3 ms·

At one point, 1990 or so, I used a high-end Sun workstation that cost about the same as the flat I lived in at the time. When the RAM was upgraded an engineer f

At one point, 1990 or so, I used a high-end Sun workstation that cost about the same as the flat I lived in at the time. When the RAM was upgraded an engineer flew from London to Edinburgh to install the upgrade! A few years later I downloaded Slackware onto multiple boxes of floppy disks and installed it on my PC at home and got a comparable development for a tiny fraction of the cost. Mind you, the screen wasn't quite as nice...

varispeed 6y ago
When an engineer takes a flight to install memory, it is clear that you are being over charged. These companies milked their monopoly position quite well.
- arethuza 6y ago
  The memory was from a 3rd party supplier, not from Sun. People on the same project drove from Milan to Edinburgh with their equivalent workstation in van to give one demo....
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  This is what it what it was like back then. I used to travel up and down the country installing systems and often wondered if there was somebody driving in the opposite direction to do the same job somewhere else.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    Yeah - my first job (in 1988) was mostly travelling about installing new software and fixing problems with various breeds of Unix/Xenix systems. Remote access was pretty rare.
jabl 6y ago
> Mind you, the screen wasn't quite as nice... Yeah, I remember as a kid when I visited my father's work. They had Sun workstations with massive 21" razor sharp (for the time) grayscale monitors, compared to the tiny 14" monitor we had at home for our PC. And they had magical preemptive multitasking where a misbehaving application didn't bring the whole system down! ZOMG!
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  Sun pioneered the "3M" model (were M meant "mega"): * 1 MB of RAM * 1 megapixels on the screen * 1 MHz CPU In the day, it seemed like unimaginable power! :)
  - arethuza 6y ago
    The first time I saw a Sun was in '87/'88 and it was a demo during the Vision class in the final year of my CS degree - what completely blew me away was the size and clarity of the screen and the fact it was running Unix.
  - guenthert 6y ago
    You might be misremembering. The 3M (megapixel/MiB/MIPS) was a set goal of project Athena. http://web.mit.edu/acs/athena.html http://web.mit.edu/acs/athena.html Edit: 3M was not a set goal of project Athena (they merely meant to use such), but a term coined by Raj Reddy of CMU. The SUN-1 workstation was indeed an early machine meeting that requirement.

varispeed 6y ago

When an engineer takes a flight to install memory, it is clear that you are being over charged. These companies milked their monopoly position quite well.

arethuza 6y ago
The memory was from a 3rd party supplier, not from Sun. People on the same project drove from Milan to Edinburgh with their equivalent workstation in van to give one demo....
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
This is what it what it was like back then. I used to travel up and down the country installing systems and often wondered if there was somebody driving in the opposite direction to do the same job somewhere else.
- arethuza 6y ago
  Yeah - my first job (in 1988) was mostly travelling about installing new software and fixing problems with various breeds of Unix/Xenix systems. Remote access was pretty rare.

jabl 6y ago

> Mind you, the screen wasn't quite as nice... Yeah, I remember as a kid when I visited my father's work. They had Sun workstations with massive 21" razor sharp (for the time) grayscale monitors, compared to the tiny 14" monitor we had at home for our PC. And they had magical preemptive multitasking where a misbehaving application didn't bring the whole system down! ZOMG!

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
Sun pioneered the "3M" model (were M meant "mega"): * 1 MB of RAM * 1 megapixels on the screen * 1 MHz CPU In the day, it seemed like unimaginable power! :)
- arethuza 6y ago
  The first time I saw a Sun was in '87/'88 and it was a demo during the Vision class in the final year of my CS degree - what completely blew me away was the size and clarity of the screen and the fact it was running Unix.
- guenthert 6y ago
  You might be misremembering. The 3M (megapixel/MiB/MIPS) was a set goal of project Athena. http://web.mit.edu/acs/athena.html http://web.mit.edu/acs/athena.html Edit: 3M was not a set goal of project Athena (they merely meant to use such), but a term coined by Raj Reddy of CMU. The SUN-1 workstation was indeed an early machine meeting that requirement.