I remember those days too, the lack of a good GUI toolkit felt like such a big deal. Funny that nowadays I find myself using applications that don't use a UI toolkit, Emacs (compiled without toolkit), st, mupdf, games that do their own UI. The only application I have running that uses GTK is chromium.
The point I was trying to make was, that there were too few gui applications at all, most of the application I was running were just terminal applications. A widely available GUI toolkit might have helped this. The funniest example was a chemical database software, which would be VT100 based running inside an xterm, but for graphical input/output would spawn a separate window based on X toolkit graphics. But beyond that, those expensive workstations (like $20k in todays money) were mostly running xterm. While being technically widely superior to the PCs of that time - there were also Win3.1 machines around, running a dreadful VT100 emulation - they made little out of it, because there was so little software. So they were eventually replaced with PCs at a fraction of the price.
Ironically, even if it were the times of Linux 1.0, I suggested they should run Linux, as they would get excellent X Windows support, unfortunately the suggestion wasn't taken upon.
