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It was obvious to me in 1990 that the Intel 486 was the death knell of the minicomputer companies. My 486 PC could run UNIX, was 32-bits, was on par with with
by jhallenworld 6y ago
It was obvious to me in 1990 that the Intel 486 was the death knell of the minicomputer companies. My 486 PC could run UNIX, was 32-bits, was on par with with the MIPS-based DECstations (also faster than VAXstations) and yet was an order of magnitude cheaper. It did take a while though- a decade later people were still using SUN workstations because the high-end EDA tools were not yet ported to Windows (well 1990 was before even Windows 3.1).
- throwaway201103 6y agoEven NeXT ported their OS to the 468. The legacy of that is likely why they were able to fairly easily transition MacOS from PPC to Intel years later. I had heard rumors that every version of Mac OS X had an Intel build secretly running at Apple.
- rvense 6y ago> I had heard rumors that every version of Mac OS X had an Intel build secretly running at Apple. Hardly a rumour, Steve Jobs said it at the announcement of the switch to Intel. "Mac OS X has been leading a secret double life", and then showed on a map at which Apple office they'd been working on it.
- gumby 6y agoNot every version. Here’s the story (on quota of all places but since corroborated): https://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets-so-well/answer/Kim-Scheinberg?srid=i1#donotlink https://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secr... I had friends working on tools for Apple (gcc, gdb, etc) who had no idea. They got bug reports from this team that had been washed of apple-specific info and posted publicly on external sites.
- cafard 6y agoAbout that time, Focus, the DG users-group magazine, mentioned a sorting benchmark, on which a 386 PC had outdone, or nearly, and MV/20000, which was the second-fastest minicomputer that Data General ever produced. Back then, 386 PCs were not cheap, but yes, they were an order of magnitude cheaper that just about any mini.