This seems more about retrocomputing than a history of the lessons of the death of workstations and their vendors. Which is sad, because I think there's a lot to bring to mind.
Although I'd argue that the CDE "collaboration" was mostly vendors giving up hope once they lost to Windows. And hope, as opposed to design skills, is something the OSS sphere has a lot.
Interest in old computing stuff stretches from Altairs to Pentium IV gaming rigs. People in a horribly overpaid industry pay good bucks to satisfy their nostalgia.
It is not just nostalgia. I recently bought a dual core Pentium 2.2Ghz motherboard with a cpu and ram plus a half height desktop case(with an itx PSU) from the same era all including shipping for $15. Out those $15 almost $10 was shipping.
Why? Because the motherboard has sata ports and I needed a cheap, low power dvr for my security cameras. I then got a 1tb sata drive for about $12 including shipping(shipping is all within one EU country so it is pretty cheap).
What does this have to do with retro computing? Well, if retro enthusiasts didn't exist those parts would most likely go to be recycled already. They all came out from a decade old business PCs and I remember the time when people would pay me to take them away.
In some sense it is a result of raspberry pi shortages and resulting exorbitant prices that people are much more likely to use old pc hardware for stuff they would use a raspberry pi before. Before anyone comments on power consumption let me say it is possible to run a lot of pc hardware under clocked and undervolted to reach some really low power consumption levels.
There are ARM single board computers with SATA ports that draw single digit Watts. Example: the Odroid HC4. If you don't need some x86 only application they might be OK for you.
> It is not just nostalgia. I recently bought a dual core Pentium 2.2Ghz motherboard[...]
Yeah, the Core Duo age is probably outside my limit for "retro". At least for now, although this is also at the point where a) you can still run most contemporary stuff outside of high-res video or games without issues, b) accessory and display tech is also mostly in line (flat screens, SATA etc.) and c) few people would use this as vehicles to run old _software_.
A good example would be the legion of people still using older Thinkpads. They rarely do this out of retro-enthusiasm.
We had a HP 9000/735 server in the lab with 715-33s as clients at my university for us students (vast overkill: CAD work stations for undergrads doing mostly text processing and compiling Scheme/C/LaTeX files).
I remember with affection the refurbished HP 9000/715-75 that I purchased from my side job developing C software while studying. It ran HP-UX 9.03 (eventually 11) and never ever crashed in six years of daily use.
Perhaps this was the best material purchase ever, perhaps followed closely by my beautifully bound, 32-volume copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Back then Hewlett-Packard still stood for top-notch engineering, and I could only laugh at fellow undergraduates with their hacky non-preeemptive Windows boxes with tiny CRTs who had their chassis open and cables hanging out, because something always needed fixing.
Years later, I purchased a HP 9000/715-100XC for spare parts, just in case.
I learned that Windows NT/2000 was considerably cheaper, had a much shorter lead time on hardware, ran the same software, could be run by mere mortals thus had a better ROI.
I saw someone selling something similar to your first link on my local Craigslist years ago. He wanted more than I was willing to spend.
There was also an SGI sever that was huge, loud, and had crazy power requirements. The price was cheap but power costs were way too much for a mortal to run.
Even today. Well the boxes are black now (sometimes white), but never the beautiful colors SGI had. I wish someone made a case that looked that nice today.
Or maybe I have bad taste, but I don't care, I still liked their purple.
Actually there were some nice beige boxes then, also black(with some silver applications), or even colored. Very streamlined design. And you could actually sit, or even stand on them. They were just rare. But you could get them. But since the PC-segment of the market was the low end, that was more work and unusual.
And sgi still could not compete, the basic problem was they were(at the begining) 5 years ahead of everyone else, but were 10 times as expensive, if that was worth it to you you would buy it, however due to the economy of scale there was a lot of money in those terrible "pc's" and not only were they were catching up quick they were a lot more inexpensive.
So as a last ditch effort sgi moves to the intel arcitechure chips but now have nothing to differentiate them, still cost too much, and did not make the move to personal music players that saved apple.
In hindsight, sgi as an independent computer manufacture could could never have won against the cheap fast hardware from intel vendors, but damn do I miss them, the hardware was always amazingly stylish, performant and cool, and they put a lot of effort into the irix desktop environment.
I do have to admit that irix was weird as hell underneath, but I think that is the end result of any commercial operating system, windows, solaris, macos are all very weird underneath as well. I am a bsd guy at heart so that is my gold standard for a logical consistent os, but even linux is straightforward and simple compared to the commercial os's, something about being able to poke around in the innards make for better looking innards. is the best I can come up with.
Ironically I actually worked for one. Operations team were windows only. Software team were java only. $12.2m wasted on not delivering an ERP system which was eventually replaced with SAP which cost twice as much and run on some Oracle stuff. SAP got replaced last year with custom software on .Net on AWS by 4 people in only 9 months.
On the original project I was the Unix expert and not needed at all so I played Solitaire for 6 months and got paid for it.
It's certainly not dead. Unix workstations are still really popular for general purpose use. You can go in a local retail chain and buy an Open Group certified Unix 64-bit RISC workstation for £639 here (Argos)...
Do you have any further info? I checked argos.co.uk and couldn't find anything.
I'm not really trying to call you out, I just don't think any of the Open Group certified Unix versions was ever licensed for the consumer market. I would need to see hard evidence to be proven wrong about that.
You can buy a Raptor POWER9 box, too. I think even a "low-end" Blackbird would easily qualify as a modern Unix workstation (the bigboy Talos II definitely would).
This is painful to read because I'm guilty of it. I left an SGI Onyx, a Sun Ultra 80, a Sun Ultra 1E, and a Sun A1000 JBOD in the basement of a house I was renting in 2003 because I couldn't be bothered to hump the gear up a flight of stairs.
I would love to have some of these in my office now, and once in a while hear the Onyx starting up and see that "Welcome to Reality" boot screen. Good times.
I got the pangs back in 2003 and managed to snag a SPARCserver 1000E with full disk array. After spending 2 days getting it up and then a 3 months using it as a workstation, I got the electricity bill.
The big stuff definitely can't run full-time if you actually pay for your electricity/care about use levels! A friend acquired a Sun Enterprise...4500? back when they were merely obsolete and not collector stuff, and attempted to run it as his home fileserver (he had several disk shelves). The $400 increase in electric bill put him off that!
On the other hand, something like a SPARCstation IPX can run all day for not too much money, and runs the best Sun operating system, SunOS 4.1.4 :P
There was a period where that kind of kit was usefully usable as (effectively) an X terminal -- you could put Linux on it, and it had a good quality CRT that you would otherwise have to pay a fair amount for. I did that in the late 90s and early 2000s with a SPARCstation 2 starting when I was in university. (I actually submitted a floating-point-emulation patch to the Linux kernel because otherwise the X server had a habit of crashing when it encountered a denormal number...) However, a couple of things made them fall out of that "vintage but still useful" bracket:
- they fell off the bottom of the "supported by Linux distros" list, so you were running something that wasn't getting security or bug fix updates any more
- LCD monitors got better and cheaper, so running a big 19 or 21 inch trinitron CRT was no longer the best available graphics experience
- at least for me personally, my disposable income for buying nice monitors went up ;-)
Machines in the "are you running a private museum collection" category are less exciting. My SS2 ended up in in the skip when I had to do a house move, I think.
For a while in the early 00s one of those SPARCstations, I forget if it was the 1 or the 2, was doing NAT and firewalling for my home network. I ran OpenBSD on it. I remember it taking multiple days to do a 'build world' and in those days I ran -current and upgraded from source.
That we need them back. The only ‘Unix workstation’ brand available right now in large quantity is Mac. Up until about four years ago was actually wasn’t a bad thing but with glued together parts, declining operating system quality, apple’s war on ports, in general obsession over stupid features with quality becoming a second rate citizen, and alternative is needed and people would actually buy it.
Other *Nix OSes lack polish and just works stuff that comes with MacOS. I tried Kubuntu because of some comments I saw on HN and Reddit. I don’t really care to put a hentai skin on my UI but I think KDE has more polish than others. There were still some slight jankyness with the mouse and trackpad. Still not sure if they’ve solved Hdpi display issues.
Windows mouse and trackpad movements are still second to MacOS but it lacks the weirdness I get on Linux.
All these 1990s Unix workstations lacked polish compared to Mac OS too. They were rock solid stable whereas Mac OS 9 was incredibly unstable back in the 1990s. But usability for the user was atrocious on a lot of these machines, and they were often 10x more expensive than a PC or Mac.
Linux was already more "polished" than most of these commercial Unix machines by 1996-1997. I used SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, DEC Unix, SCO, and more in one of my first jobs.
Back then those Unix machines were all desktops. So was linux for the most part, although it was certainly possible to setup a Linux laptop by then. A lot of the stuff that Linux lags on today compared to Mac OS like graphics acceleration, power management, battery life, external/internal monitor switching, etc.. were kind of irrelevant back then as the machines just sat on a desk and you didn't move them around, there was no wireless, and graphics acceleration was in it's infancy. (You could get accelerators on the Unix machines but they cost 10s of thousands.)
But out of the box a bunch of those Unix workstations would have stupidly broken stuff and you'd be spending a bunch of time fixing configuration and installing software before you could feel productive on the machines. Stupid stuff like opening a terminal and the key mappings were not even configured! You'd try to do something and even the backspace key would be broken.
IRIX was the most polished in my memory. The last Sun machine I had at work was in 2003-2004. But I was doing a lot on Windows at that point. It was a few more years before places I worked started realizing OSX could do it all. Around 2010 or so I remember being shocked when we dropped support for Solaris for the product I worked on. When we had first started supporting linux (something I had worked on) it was edgy, just a few years laster all the customers had dropped all the commercial unix variants and only wanted linux support.
Yes, I used Mac OS 9 and it was terrible. I used Macs in school and a good friend had one. It was only slightly worse than windows at the time. OS 9 crashed nonstop.
I was too young for Unix workstations. My only experience with them was a graybeard system admin who still had 2 Sparq workstations running something under his desk. Around 2015 they finally replaced the service it was running. I’m pretty sure he took them home to add to his collection.
I used Linux at home since 1995's Summer (dual boot), and at work I only started using GNU/Linux in any kind of serious workload while at CERN in 2002, until then Aix, HP-UX, and Solaris were our workhorses, alongside Windows NT/2000.
At CERN back in 2002, most people were transitioning to OS X and Windows 2000 from Solaris pizza boxes, largely leaving GNU/Linux for the server room.
Scientific Linux was their very first supported version, back in 2004.
Nokia Networks only started the transition of HP-UX into GNU/Linux around 2005, and even then, HP-UX was still supported for quite some time until the final switch took place.
For me, the workstation was always the more local, personalized door to the scalable compute environment. It could run more convenient or pretty tools, but was a compute environment for my own programming. The other kind of workstation environment, dedicated to CAD or other canned applications, was not very relevant to me. But, I did realize that market was eroding to Windows NT and therefore undermining the revenue streams of the Unix vendors.
I learned that my needs do not always align with the population at large, and I should be aware what is happening but not slavishly follow the common wisdom or marketing. I also learned about open source and free software and realized how costly the commercial software treadmill is, with constant obsolescence. I learned to see the open source world as a living process that I could contribute to and rely upon. I built my career in parallel with the rise of Linux, writing open source software. To this day, I go out of my way to use free and open source tools and treat commercial software like a hazardous material.
I started using Linux in college in the very early days around 1993. I quickly became a full-time Linux user, and have essentially never had a personal nor work computer with Windows nor Mac OS since then. They are both alien platforms to me. I have often had Windows in a VM for the occasional use of some proprietary program, but I feel like a fish out of water when I touch it.
In college, we had many flavors of Unix workstations and shared servers with terminal farms. We also had a local culture of BSD usage by the self-appointed CS hacker/gatekeepers, and they looked down on Linux. But, I found that my home PC with Linux was sufficient for most of my coursework and saved me from crunch times when labs were oversubscribed.
I also brought Linux with me to work. In 1996 I already knew a PC running Linux was a better "workstation" for me than the Unix machines my university habitually purchased. I can still remember a crappy Dell laptop with a Pentium MMX which outperformed a Sun Ultra in my real everyday work with compilers, insane autoconf+makefile build systems, etc. At the same time, I was very aware of the Linux HPC developments going on in the US national labs and anticipated the increase relevance of Linux.
My early job years included maintenance and porting of C based libraries to many Unix HPC platforms. I made sure it also worked on Linux. I tested Linux on my own hardware and also used remote resources in our building or at various US supercomputing centers for the other ports. I have now forgotten some of the OS names, but it included HPC variants from IBM, HP, SGI, Cray, etc. I even got mileage out of Linux on my personal DEC Multia (alpha) to do initial 64-bit porting before re-testing and finalizing on various remote platforms.
I was an early/beta user of so many frontiers of Linux. I learned that the community would rapidly adapt to new requirements as they appeared, and I found this very reliable tooling for my career. I was there for the early 2D graphics acceleration, the switch to SMP, the early 3D acceleration, and various changes to allow large storage, large files, and fast networking. Through work, I was also an early adopter/tester of qemu-kvm virtualization. Previously, VMware was one of the rare proprietary programs I used on Linux.
> Back then those Unix machines were all desktops. So was linux for the most part, although it was certainly possible to setup a Linux laptop by then.
Not quite all Unix machines were desktops. Tadpole made the SPARCbook line of laptops which ran SunOS/Solaris. In conjunction with IBM they made a PowerPC RS6000 laptop for IBM which ran AIX.
They also made the ALPHAbook 1 laptop which initially shipped with OpenVMS. I'm not sure if it lasted long enough to get the planned port of DEC UNIX. At the time I tried to convince my employer to purchase a ALPHAbook for me, but before that decision was made I left never to touch an OpenVMS system again.
They do seem to have moved past the "minimalism for the sake of minimalism" of recent years - the Studio also has a nice selection of ports, and a theoretically-replaceable SSD. Just be sure to buy what you need now, because there's no upgrading.
Then there's the MacBook keyboard. Hello, what happened to PgUp/PgDn/Home/End? I use those a LOT, enough to be a deal-breaker.
I'm pretty sure you can still do Fn+up/down/left/right to get PgUp/PgDn/Home/End. They just might not label it anymore. I don't think Apple ever had those keys on laptops. Prior to them adding the Fn key I don't think they even had a way to get them.
I don't think so? Apple's list of shortcuts has Cmd+Up/Down/Left/Right as moving the insertion point for text to the beginning of document/line or end of document or line not Pg Up/Down/Home/End.
That's right. On PCs, Page Up, Page Down, Home and End move the cursor, but on Mac, they only scroll up one page, down one page, to the start, to the end, respectively, without moving the cursor. (Also, the cursor is called the insertion point on Mac.)
Home/End on macOS have also been C-a/C-e for a very long time thanks to pervasive emacs key bindings throughout most text fields (goes back to NeXT, IIRC)
I wouldn't say fantastic. You still need a dongle for USB A which I imagine would be more useful to everybody but photographers instead of the SD card slot.
And they still have some ridiculous models like the 2 port iMac.
* the mass-produced "descendants" of "IBM PC-AT compatible machines" got powerfull enough to replace those workstations which carried a hefty price-tag
* proprietary UNIX-OSes where doomed - thanks to FOSS / linux / *BSD
* again: thanks to linux / *BSD we could do "serious" work with cheap of-the-shelf hardware ...
Cheap off the shelf is important. I worked at a mac/pc shop in the mid 90s. To kit out a mac dev was easily 25,000. I could do a similar pc dev for about 2500. If I remember correctly sun was in similar ballpark numbers as the mac. I could tell even then once linux/bsd got its act together it would eat the server space as MS was starting to charge eye eyepopping numbers per user for network access on their servers. Cheap is not that big of a deal when you are working on a multi million dollar proj and there are 1-2 devs and maybe 1-2 users. But scale that past 20-30 and the numbers add up fast.
> I worked at a mac/pc shop in the mid 90s. To kit out a mac dev was easily 25,000. I could do a similar pc dev for about 2500.
Those numbers are off by an order of magnitude unless you lived somewhere with really hefty tariffs. You were probably looking at $2-6K for a PC and $3-8k for Mac depending on what you needed — most of the times when people did price comparisons they forgot to spec out equivalent builds so you'd have, say, a Mac with a CD-ROM, ethernet, high-quality video and audio being compared to a PC with basic sound hardware, no network card, and a lower-res video card. Even a NeXT cube wasn't $25K unless you bought three of them.
Sun, SGI, etc. were higher and that was in no small part because they had the enterprise sales model where you had to call a sales person and negotiate a corporate purchase.
I did ditch my 3 SGI Sony Trinitron 21 inch monitors. The were the pinnacle of CRTs in my experience. I do still have a couple O2s, 3 or 4 Octane 2s, and a Fuel in my garage.
I don't have it anymore, but for many years I kept an old Nokia CRT that I considered to be the pinnacle of the CRTs I had used. It was probably purchased in the late 1990s, something like (from googling) the Nokia 447xpro model. They used Trinitron screens, but Nokia also added really nice software for the on-screen control/setup stuff. I miss the old Nokia (their early GSM phones too!).
Incorrect, the retro-computing crowd is paying increasingly decent money for good working monitors, especially the ones that have a recognizable brand on the badge.
At the time when “workstations” were phasing out the key thing was to have a GNU user land. I’ve disagreed with those folks plenty since but that shit was untouchable at the time.
I have strong hopes for stuff like the Talos II workstation and the rise of RISC V, coupled with the decline of consumer desktop PCs, resulting in the return of UNIX workstations.
> Now CAD runs ... on Windows and the experience is atrocious.
Well, maybe Windows is now atrocious, but at the time Windows was murdering Unix workstations, Windows was greatly superior. When the shop I was working for at the time switched our Pro/ENGINEER hardware from SGI to whitebox PCs running Windows NT it was like a miracle. Everything that was horrible in the day-to-day of using IRIX stopped, and suddenly our workstations were useful for more than just running Pro/E. We could run Excel and whatnot. And a dual Pentium Pro was about fifty bajillion times faster than anything MIPS ever made.
What do you mean by "HP made none"? There were absolutely great HP PA-RISC workstations. I have a C8000 here which with dual PA-8900s was a beast by then-contemporary standards, but there were all kinds of HP PA desktops.
While HPaq didn't make Alpha workstations themselves, others did (there's a 164LX here, running Tru64).
My first professional computer was an SGI O2. The thing that bothered me at the time was how completely closed the architecture was. It costs hundreds of dollars to buy compilers for example. Linux was an amazing thing in comparison because almost everything I needed to do my job was free. I never took Windows seriously so I’ve not used it. MSFT had far better sales reps at the time though from what I recall.
I got my first c++ compiler for windows practically free with a book. I think full version of visual studio was $100 when I was first learning to code in early 90s. There were tons of free ware compilers for dos. Unix was basically impossible for anyone without a corporate job
Windows software had the advantage of popularity, there were always "unlocked" professional tools floating around if you had a modem and knew what number to dial. Unix tools tended to be not only rare and proprietary, but suffered from a lack of l33t hacking scene to remove their pervasive licence files requirements.
That was the way things were back in the 1980s. The only reason I managed to gain any experience programming in C on my Amiga is because one of my uncles bought me a $400 compiler to use (Aztec C). Things became easier in the 1990s as gcc improved and was ported to virtually every architecture on the planet. Richard Stallman was right to focus on a C compiler as a prerequisite to building the rest of the free software ecosystem.
Absolutely - a very portable one, but modern Macs would absolutely qualify (and blow those classics out of the water in both computing power and low electricity consumption.
Several years ago while at a university for CS, I was doing a senior class where I was doing whatever an assigned professor wanted me to help with. I was given two identical ThinkPads and a mid-2012 MacBook Pro and told to figure out a network partitioning problem involving virtual machines.
Since the ThinkPads were running Windows, those were pretty forgettable. But as soon as I opened up the MacBook Pro and turned it on, my first thought was "This is a workstation."
At the time my personal laptop was a 11" MacBook Air. Currently I use a 2014 Mac mini and a mid-2012 MBP, which I bought used because of that faithful encounter.
I've never been able to elicit that initial reaction I had to the MBP since owning one myself. It's one of those things like how a single bite of someone else's food tastes better than the whole dish you end up ordering for yourself.
As an aside, I bought a SPARCstation IPC for $25 from someone on IRC around 2001.
It's good we're having discussions like these. People tend to oversimplify history, so young people may end up with different ideas about how things were then than how they actually were.
It's not only important to bring lessons from the Unix workstation era of computing to the present and to the future, it's also important to realize which lessons we've already learned. Does your video game make incredibly heavy use of your GPU? Who do you think was deeply integrating GPUs in to their OSes and software in the '90s? TCP/IP networking? Where do people think that originated and matured?
One lesson most people now don't know much about is the quality of well-built hardware. Most people are aware that there's mainframe hardware, which is just worlds different than what we commonly see, then there's everything else. But in the Unix workstation era, much of the hardware was build with a different set of priorities - cost-cutting really wasn't a thing for most of the hardware, which is why VAXen and Alpha machines are often still running today. (A lot of Sun and some SGI hardware, though, was built like personal computers of the time, and have a higher failure / repair rate.)
I wish it was possible to pay more for hardware and get components that are just made measurably better than common hardware. If you've ever seen the traces on a VAXStation or an AlphaServer, you'd know what I mean. We can, sorta - we can buy faster memory and run it slower, we can manually overprovision our SSDs, et cetera, but it's just not part of the market (and x86 servers have a very high failure rate, so I'm not talking about them).
I still have my AlphaServer DS25 colocated, running public services, compiling NetBSD pkgsrc packages, et cetera. The hardware is incredibly high quality.
> I wish it was possible to pay more for hardware and get components that are just made measurably better than common hardware.
I do too, but I just don't see it happening with the market. After a company has established a reputation for quality, it's too tempting for a business leader to cut corners and reap a short-term windfall before their customers figure out they're not getting what they're paying for.
I find it mildly interesting that there is no elite tier of hardware available, like the equivalent of a super fancy watch or some fabulously expensive Japanese woodworking tools that you pass on to your children. You'd think that with so much money sloshing around the Valley in the last 20 years, someone would be making super high-end, artisanal hardware.
> I find it mildly interesting that there is no elite tier of hardware available, like the equivalent of a super fancy watch or some fabulously expensive Japanese woodworking tools that you pass on to your children. You'd think that with so much money sloshing around the Valley in the last 20 years, someone would be making super high-end, artisanal hardware.
I bet there is, but it's more diamond-encrusted iPhones than ultra-reliable motherboards.
They learned that you can be pecked to death by ducks.
Context: When PCs were starting to reach useful levels of ability, people started saying that PCs were going to replace workstations. In response, someone at SGI published an article titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks", arguing that PCs would never kill the workstation market. Then dual processor PCs started happening, and he published a sequel, literally titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks With Two Bills".
As the drift away from general purpose computing intensifies, we'll see more of this mainframe/thinclient model, but we call it cloud/mobile now. Only a matter of time before our workstations are back.
105 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadInterest in old computing stuff stretches from Altairs to Pentium IV gaming rigs. People in a horribly overpaid industry pay good bucks to satisfy their nostalgia.
> This seems more about retrocomputing than a history of the lessons of the death of workstations and their vendors.
Little bit, yes. I highly recommend following the link and reading Holwerda's article which inspired this.
HN discussions on that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33948573
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33953816
Why? Because the motherboard has sata ports and I needed a cheap, low power dvr for my security cameras. I then got a 1tb sata drive for about $12 including shipping(shipping is all within one EU country so it is pretty cheap).
What does this have to do with retro computing? Well, if retro enthusiasts didn't exist those parts would most likely go to be recycled already. They all came out from a decade old business PCs and I remember the time when people would pay me to take them away.
In some sense it is a result of raspberry pi shortages and resulting exorbitant prices that people are much more likely to use old pc hardware for stuff they would use a raspberry pi before. Before anyone comments on power consumption let me say it is possible to run a lot of pc hardware under clocked and undervolted to reach some really low power consumption levels.
How much power does it draw?
Yeah, the Core Duo age is probably outside my limit for "retro". At least for now, although this is also at the point where a) you can still run most contemporary stuff outside of high-res video or games without issues, b) accessory and display tech is also mostly in line (flat screens, SATA etc.) and c) few people would use this as vehicles to run old _software_.
A good example would be the legion of people still using older Thinkpads. They rarely do this out of retro-enthusiasm.
I remember with affection the refurbished HP 9000/715-75 that I purchased from my side job developing C software while studying. It ran HP-UX 9.03 (eventually 11) and never ever crashed in six years of daily use. Perhaps this was the best material purchase ever, perhaps followed closely by my beautifully bound, 32-volume copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Back then Hewlett-Packard still stood for top-notch engineering, and I could only laugh at fellow undergraduates with their hacky non-preeemptive Windows boxes with tiny CRTs who had their chassis open and cables hanging out, because something always needed fixing.
Years later, I purchased a HP 9000/715-100XC for spare parts, just in case.
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/507/SGI-320-Visual-Wo...
http://www.sgistuff.net/hardware/systems/vw320540.html
There was also an SGI sever that was huge, loud, and had crazy power requirements. The price was cheap but power costs were way too much for a mortal to run.
Or maybe I have bad taste, but I don't care, I still liked their purple.
Also the machines only ran windows not Irix (their unix)
So as a last ditch effort sgi moves to the intel arcitechure chips but now have nothing to differentiate them, still cost too much, and did not make the move to personal music players that saved apple.
In hindsight, sgi as an independent computer manufacture could could never have won against the cheap fast hardware from intel vendors, but damn do I miss them, the hardware was always amazingly stylish, performant and cool, and they put a lot of effort into the irix desktop environment.
I do have to admit that irix was weird as hell underneath, but I think that is the end result of any commercial operating system, windows, solaris, macos are all very weird underneath as well. I am a bsd guy at heart so that is my gold standard for a logical consistent os, but even linux is straightforward and simple compared to the commercial os's, something about being able to poke around in the innards make for better looking innards. is the best I can come up with.
On the original project I was the Unix expert and not needed at all so I played Solitaire for 6 months and got paid for it.
I know for sure some european airlines are running their ticket systems in such stacks.
If you know how to debug ASP.NET applications you will eventually discover them.
Software demands were EE/EDA stuff like Cadence, Zukon.
Corrected, True: OpenVMS has an Intel build made public
Source: https://vmssoftware.com/about/openvmsx86/
They don't offer hobbyist licenses, which is an absolutely braindead decision.
IBM AIX is still developed
Linux added support to SGI Octane machines
It is not ENTIRELY DEAD
edit: This was a wrong statement made by me: "Wrong: HP HPUX has an Intel build in the pipelines", my memory failed me. Corrected above.
It does? That's news to me. And to the Internet in general AFAICS.
[[Citation needed]]
VMS, not HP-UX
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/10/openvms_92/
I was a VMS sysadmin in the early 1990s. This was very pleasing news.
https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/23/hp_project_blackbird_...
A few pages down, there is a Slashdot story: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/11/06/1354237/hps-non...
https://www.argos.co.uk/product/8802877?clickSR=slp:term:app...
I'm not really trying to call you out, I just don't think any of the Open Group certified Unix versions was ever licensed for the consumer market. I would need to see hard evidence to be proven wrong about that.
https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
Certification of the OS: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/certificates/1217p.pdf which is linked on the page you posted.
It's a proper Unix machine. Costs slightly more than a nickel :)
I would love to have some of these in my office now, and once in a while hear the Onyx starting up and see that "Welcome to Reality" boot screen. Good times.
That ended my interest in running vintage kit...
On the other hand, something like a SPARCstation IPX can run all day for not too much money, and runs the best Sun operating system, SunOS 4.1.4 :P
Let them all go for cheap in the mid 00s because I didn’t want them taking up space.
- they fell off the bottom of the "supported by Linux distros" list, so you were running something that wasn't getting security or bug fix updates any more
- LCD monitors got better and cheaper, so running a big 19 or 21 inch trinitron CRT was no longer the best available graphics experience
- at least for me personally, my disposable income for buying nice monitors went up ;-)
Machines in the "are you running a private museum collection" category are less exciting. My SS2 ended up in in the skip when I had to do a house move, I think.
But yeah, it's mostly museum stuff now.
Windows mouse and trackpad movements are still second to MacOS but it lacks the weirdness I get on Linux.
Linux was already more "polished" than most of these commercial Unix machines by 1996-1997. I used SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, DEC Unix, SCO, and more in one of my first jobs.
Back then those Unix machines were all desktops. So was linux for the most part, although it was certainly possible to setup a Linux laptop by then. A lot of the stuff that Linux lags on today compared to Mac OS like graphics acceleration, power management, battery life, external/internal monitor switching, etc.. were kind of irrelevant back then as the machines just sat on a desk and you didn't move them around, there was no wireless, and graphics acceleration was in it's infancy. (You could get accelerators on the Unix machines but they cost 10s of thousands.)
But out of the box a bunch of those Unix workstations would have stupidly broken stuff and you'd be spending a bunch of time fixing configuration and installing software before you could feel productive on the machines. Stupid stuff like opening a terminal and the key mappings were not even configured! You'd try to do something and even the backspace key would be broken.
IRIX was the most polished in my memory. The last Sun machine I had at work was in 2003-2004. But I was doing a lot on Windows at that point. It was a few more years before places I worked started realizing OSX could do it all. Around 2010 or so I remember being shocked when we dropped support for Solaris for the product I worked on. When we had first started supporting linux (something I had worked on) it was edgy, just a few years laster all the customers had dropped all the commercial unix variants and only wanted linux support.
I was too young for Unix workstations. My only experience with them was a graybeard system admin who still had 2 Sparq workstations running something under his desk. Around 2015 they finally replaced the service it was running. I’m pretty sure he took them home to add to his collection.
At CERN back in 2002, most people were transitioning to OS X and Windows 2000 from Solaris pizza boxes, largely leaving GNU/Linux for the server room.
Scientific Linux was their very first supported version, back in 2004.
Nokia Networks only started the transition of HP-UX into GNU/Linux around 2005, and even then, HP-UX was still supported for quite some time until the final switch took place.
I learned that my needs do not always align with the population at large, and I should be aware what is happening but not slavishly follow the common wisdom or marketing. I also learned about open source and free software and realized how costly the commercial software treadmill is, with constant obsolescence. I learned to see the open source world as a living process that I could contribute to and rely upon. I built my career in parallel with the rise of Linux, writing open source software. To this day, I go out of my way to use free and open source tools and treat commercial software like a hazardous material.
I started using Linux in college in the very early days around 1993. I quickly became a full-time Linux user, and have essentially never had a personal nor work computer with Windows nor Mac OS since then. They are both alien platforms to me. I have often had Windows in a VM for the occasional use of some proprietary program, but I feel like a fish out of water when I touch it.
In college, we had many flavors of Unix workstations and shared servers with terminal farms. We also had a local culture of BSD usage by the self-appointed CS hacker/gatekeepers, and they looked down on Linux. But, I found that my home PC with Linux was sufficient for most of my coursework and saved me from crunch times when labs were oversubscribed.
I also brought Linux with me to work. In 1996 I already knew a PC running Linux was a better "workstation" for me than the Unix machines my university habitually purchased. I can still remember a crappy Dell laptop with a Pentium MMX which outperformed a Sun Ultra in my real everyday work with compilers, insane autoconf+makefile build systems, etc. At the same time, I was very aware of the Linux HPC developments going on in the US national labs and anticipated the increase relevance of Linux.
My early job years included maintenance and porting of C based libraries to many Unix HPC platforms. I made sure it also worked on Linux. I tested Linux on my own hardware and also used remote resources in our building or at various US supercomputing centers for the other ports. I have now forgotten some of the OS names, but it included HPC variants from IBM, HP, SGI, Cray, etc. I even got mileage out of Linux on my personal DEC Multia (alpha) to do initial 64-bit porting before re-testing and finalizing on various remote platforms.
I was an early/beta user of so many frontiers of Linux. I learned that the community would rapidly adapt to new requirements as they appeared, and I found this very reliable tooling for my career. I was there for the early 2D graphics acceleration, the switch to SMP, the early 3D acceleration, and various changes to allow large storage, large files, and fast networking. Through work, I was also an early adopter/tester of qemu-kvm virtualization. Previously, VMware was one of the rare proprietary programs I used on Linux.
Not quite all Unix machines were desktops. Tadpole made the SPARCbook line of laptops which ran SunOS/Solaris. In conjunction with IBM they made a PowerPC RS6000 laptop for IBM which ran AIX.
They also made the ALPHAbook 1 laptop which initially shipped with OpenVMS. I'm not sure if it lasted long enough to get the planned port of DEC UNIX. At the time I tried to convince my employer to purchase a ALPHAbook for me, but before that decision was made I left never to touch an OpenVMS system again.
If you're going to credibly bust on Apple, you would do well to keep up. The latest iteration of the MacBook Pro includes a fantastic set of ports.
Then there's the MacBook keyboard. Hello, what happened to PgUp/PgDn/Home/End? I use those a LOT, enough to be a deal-breaker.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236
And they still have some ridiculous models like the 2 port iMac.
* the mass-produced "descendants" of "IBM PC-AT compatible machines" got powerfull enough to replace those workstations which carried a hefty price-tag
* proprietary UNIX-OSes where doomed - thanks to FOSS / linux / *BSD
* again: thanks to linux / *BSD we could do "serious" work with cheap of-the-shelf hardware ...
Those numbers are off by an order of magnitude unless you lived somewhere with really hefty tariffs. You were probably looking at $2-6K for a PC and $3-8k for Mac depending on what you needed — most of the times when people did price comparisons they forgot to spec out equivalent builds so you'd have, say, a Mac with a CD-ROM, ethernet, high-quality video and audio being compared to a PC with basic sound hardware, no network card, and a lower-res video card. Even a NeXT cube wasn't $25K unless you bought three of them.
Sun, SGI, etc. were higher and that was in no small part because they had the enterprise sales model where you had to call a sales person and negotiate a corporate purchase.
Unless it's a CRT monitor. No one wants those.
I'm hearing about many retro gamers that love these
That greed (the promise of Itanium) can destroy a lot of things.
Now CAD runs (or better, it tries to) on Windows and the experience is atrocious.
That HP from 2 great architectures (Alpha, PA-Risc) made none, didn't help either.
Well, maybe Windows is now atrocious, but at the time Windows was murdering Unix workstations, Windows was greatly superior. When the shop I was working for at the time switched our Pro/ENGINEER hardware from SGI to whitebox PCs running Windows NT it was like a miracle. Everything that was horrible in the day-to-day of using IRIX stopped, and suddenly our workstations were useful for more than just running Pro/E. We could run Excel and whatnot. And a dual Pentium Pro was about fifty bajillion times faster than anything MIPS ever made.
While HPaq didn't make Alpha workstations themselves, others did (there's a 164LX here, running Tru64).
It cost tens of thousands of dollars to buy an O2.
Since the ThinkPads were running Windows, those were pretty forgettable. But as soon as I opened up the MacBook Pro and turned it on, my first thought was "This is a workstation."
At the time my personal laptop was a 11" MacBook Air. Currently I use a 2014 Mac mini and a mid-2012 MBP, which I bought used because of that faithful encounter.
I've never been able to elicit that initial reaction I had to the MBP since owning one myself. It's one of those things like how a single bite of someone else's food tastes better than the whole dish you end up ordering for yourself.
As an aside, I bought a SPARCstation IPC for $25 from someone on IRC around 2001.
It's not only important to bring lessons from the Unix workstation era of computing to the present and to the future, it's also important to realize which lessons we've already learned. Does your video game make incredibly heavy use of your GPU? Who do you think was deeply integrating GPUs in to their OSes and software in the '90s? TCP/IP networking? Where do people think that originated and matured?
One lesson most people now don't know much about is the quality of well-built hardware. Most people are aware that there's mainframe hardware, which is just worlds different than what we commonly see, then there's everything else. But in the Unix workstation era, much of the hardware was build with a different set of priorities - cost-cutting really wasn't a thing for most of the hardware, which is why VAXen and Alpha machines are often still running today. (A lot of Sun and some SGI hardware, though, was built like personal computers of the time, and have a higher failure / repair rate.)
I wish it was possible to pay more for hardware and get components that are just made measurably better than common hardware. If you've ever seen the traces on a VAXStation or an AlphaServer, you'd know what I mean. We can, sorta - we can buy faster memory and run it slower, we can manually overprovision our SSDs, et cetera, but it's just not part of the market (and x86 servers have a very high failure rate, so I'm not talking about them).
I still have my AlphaServer DS25 colocated, running public services, compiling NetBSD pkgsrc packages, et cetera. The hardware is incredibly high quality.
I do too, but I just don't see it happening with the market. After a company has established a reputation for quality, it's too tempting for a business leader to cut corners and reap a short-term windfall before their customers figure out they're not getting what they're paying for.
I bet there is, but it's more diamond-encrusted iPhones than ultra-reliable motherboards.
SGUG-RSE includes over 2700 packages ported from Fedora Core 31 SRPMs.
https://github.com/sgidevnet/sgug-rse for all 3 of you with SGI machines here.
Context: When PCs were starting to reach useful levels of ability, people started saying that PCs were going to replace workstations. In response, someone at SGI published an article titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks", arguing that PCs would never kill the workstation market. Then dual processor PCs started happening, and he published a sequel, literally titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks With Two Bills".
And then the ducks pecked SGI to death.