2 ms·

No, they were already way overpriced. The Unix workstations were nice, and had good tools. But you could buy dual cpu intel machines of very roughly equivalen

by ska 7y ago

No, they were already way overpriced. The Unix workstations were nice, and had good tools. But you could buy dual cpu intel machines of very roughly equivalent performance (excepting some specific tasks) for about 1/4 the cost (or less), and put Linux or BSD on them. The writing was on the wall you at least 97 , and the Unix vendors looked at it and just kept doing the same thing. They were already dead, but the dot.com collapse finished them a little faster I suppose.

taborj 7y ago
For reference, I purchased a Micron system with a dual Pentium Pro slot W6-Li motherboard (but -- and this is crucial -- only one 180MHz PPro chip), SCSI internals, 64MB of RAM and a CD writer, for $5200. This was in 1996. If I recall correctly, adding the second PPro 180MHz chip added around $2k to the price. Call it $7-8k all in. The 200MHz PPro had a SPECInt92 value of 366[0]. You can find a list of other SPECInt92 values here[1]. So it was, indeed, faster than many systems, but not the fastest. Value for money? Yeah, it had it. There were x86 versions of SVR4 UNIX available commercially, so it's quite plausible that you could do an apples-to-apples comparison. I'm sure one is out there, but I don't have the time to find one. It's worth noting that in 1994, Eric S. Raymond discontinued his "PC-clone UNIX buyers guide" because he had switched to Linux, and didn't think that UNIX had a future. [2] I think it's still fair to say that the dedicated UNIX workstations had a certain panache that made "real" engineers want them, badly. [0] https://www.hpcwire.com/1995/11/03/200-mhz-intel-pentium-pro-benchmarks-at-366-specint92/ https://www.hpcwire.com/1995/11/03/200-mhz-intel-pentium-pro... [1] http://performance.netlib.org/performance/html/new.spec.cint92.col0.html http://performance.netlib.org/performance/html/new.spec.cint... [2] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/clone-unix-guide.txt http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/clone-unix-guide.txt

by ska 7y ago

taborj 7y ago

For reference, I purchased a Micron system with a dual Pentium Pro slot W6-Li motherboard (but -- and this is crucial -- only one 180MHz PPro chip), SCSI internals, 64MB of RAM and a CD writer, for $5200. This was in 1996. If I recall correctly, adding the second PPro 180MHz chip added around $2k to the price. Call it $7-8k all in. The 200MHz PPro had a SPECInt92 value of 366[0]. You can find a list of other SPECInt92 values here[1]. So it was, indeed, faster than many systems, but not the fastest. Value for money? Yeah, it had it. There were x86 versions of SVR4 UNIX available commercially, so it's quite plausible that you could do an apples-to-apples comparison. I'm sure one is out there, but I don't have the time to find one. It's worth noting that in 1994, Eric S. Raymond discontinued his "PC-clone UNIX buyers guide" because he had switched to Linux, and didn't think that UNIX had a future. [2] I think it's still fair to say that the dedicated UNIX workstations had a certain panache that made "real" engineers want them, badly. [0] https://www.hpcwire.com/1995/11/03/200-mhz-intel-pentium-pro-benchmarks-at-366-specint92/ https://www.hpcwire.com/1995/11/03/200-mhz-intel-pentium-pro... [1] http://performance.netlib.org/performance/html/new.spec.cint92.col0.html http://performance.netlib.org/performance/html/new.spec.cint... [2] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/clone-unix-guide.txt http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/clone-unix-guide.txt