37 ms·

This takes me back to the first summer internship I had, where I was plopped in front of an SS5 back in 1998. I was a 17 year old kid who had a 486 at home, so

by ben1040 15y ago

This takes me back to the first summer internship I had, where I was plopped in front of an SS5 back in 1998. I was a 17 year old kid who had a 486 at home, so this machine with no removable disks whatsoever really perplexed me. Then I realized I could walk to any workstation in the lab, sign in, and my homedir and everything would be right there, while everything ran off the app server transparently. "The network is the computer" blew my mind. Our group's web server at the time was on a quad-CPU 50 MHz SS20. I can't imagine what that thing had to have cost when it was new. In 2001, when I was in college, some lab in my engineering school decided to dump some SS5's. My roommates and I rescued a handful of them from the dumpster, and then mixed and matched parts from them so we'd have three decent machines. We set them up on a table made from an old cable spool, and on any given weekday evening there'd be three or four people coding away on them.

spitfire 15y ago
It's sort of funny, if you can find an old HP PA-RISC 712, or Sun SS20 you can throw NeXTstep (OS-X) on it and it'll keep up with modern machines just fine. Wordprocessors will open up just as fast as your modern machine (without an ssd), mathematica keeps up with whatever you throw at it, and emacs is just fine. I'm still not entirely sure what happened to the last 15 years of performance gains. EDIT: I got through college in 2000 onwards using a nextstation turbo. mathematica and openwrite handled things just fine. I'm confident I could cope reasonable well with that setup again if I had to.
- wisty 15y ago
  Between 2000 and 2010, computers should have gotten about 100 times faster (assuming speed increases by 2^(10/1.5) - yeah I know that's not really Moore's law, but let's assume it's almost reasonable). Your server class SS20 was about 5 years ahead of commodity boxes. This was the days when servers (or workstations) were much faster than consumer boxes. A computer these days will spend most of it's time at 1-5%. That's with a heavyweight OS, multiple applications open, and modern applications (which are not built to be frugal). So, while your computer would be almost capable of running a modern workload. It would hang, now and then, if you tried compiling or running a badly written flash app, but otherwise would be fine. Most of the last 15 years of performance gains have allowed consumer computers to catch up with workstations, made occasional tasks (like importing documents, and compiling small programs) almost instantaneous (rather than annoyingly slow), and allowed programmers to fill up the screen with eye candy.
  - arethuza 15y ago
    I'm pretty sure that the subjectively fastest machine I've ever used was a Sparcstation 4/330 with a monochrome screen about 1990 or so (I'm pretty sure it had a ridiculous amount of RAM for the time, 72MB or something). With SunOS and the vanilla X11R4 build it really was quite nippy.
- bonaldi 15y ago
  Ho, I knew there was a reason I kept the SS10 lurking under the bed. Somehow I didn't realise that OS3.3 would run on it. Now to find the 3.3 sparc disks, and copies of Improv and WriteNow. This looks like it might be tricky...
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - spitfire 15y ago
    Bittorrent has them. There's archives of old next software out there as well.
hugh3 15y ago
When I started in resesearch back in 2000, every self-respecting theoretical physicist would have some kind of special-purpose workstation sitting around. I learned Unix on the astronomy department's Suns, before switching to a much funkier-looking AlphaStation when I switched departments. They were the last of a dying breed, though. By circa 2003 when they were up for replacement there was really no point in having one of these over a high-end commodity box running Linux. Circa 2011, my next "workstation" will probably be a MacBook Air. With the rise of cheap commodity clusters there's really no point in even trying to have signficiant number-crunching power on your own desk. I don't miss the Suns though. They were a bastard to use.

by ben1040 15y ago

spitfire 15y ago

It's sort of funny, if you can find an old HP PA-RISC 712, or Sun SS20 you can throw NeXTstep (OS-X) on it and it'll keep up with modern machines just fine. Wordprocessors will open up just as fast as your modern machine (without an ssd), mathematica keeps up with whatever you throw at it, and emacs is just fine. I'm still not entirely sure what happened to the last 15 years of performance gains. EDIT: I got through college in 2000 onwards using a nextstation turbo. mathematica and openwrite handled things just fine. I'm confident I could cope reasonable well with that setup again if I had to.

wisty 15y ago
Between 2000 and 2010, computers should have gotten about 100 times faster (assuming speed increases by 2^(10/1.5) - yeah I know that's not really Moore's law, but let's assume it's almost reasonable). Your server class SS20 was about 5 years ahead of commodity boxes. This was the days when servers (or workstations) were much faster than consumer boxes. A computer these days will spend most of it's time at 1-5%. That's with a heavyweight OS, multiple applications open, and modern applications (which are not built to be frugal). So, while your computer would be almost capable of running a modern workload. It would hang, now and then, if you tried compiling or running a badly written flash app, but otherwise would be fine. Most of the last 15 years of performance gains have allowed consumer computers to catch up with workstations, made occasional tasks (like importing documents, and compiling small programs) almost instantaneous (rather than annoyingly slow), and allowed programmers to fill up the screen with eye candy.
- arethuza 15y ago
  I'm pretty sure that the subjectively fastest machine I've ever used was a Sparcstation 4/330 with a monochrome screen about 1990 or so (I'm pretty sure it had a ridiculous amount of RAM for the time, 72MB or something). With SunOS and the vanilla X11R4 build it really was quite nippy.
bonaldi 15y ago
Ho, I knew there was a reason I kept the SS10 lurking under the bed. Somehow I didn't realise that OS3.3 would run on it. Now to find the 3.3 sparc disks, and copies of Improv and WriteNow. This looks like it might be tricky...
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- spitfire 15y ago
  Bittorrent has them. There's archives of old next software out there as well.

hugh3 15y ago

When I started in resesearch back in 2000, every self-respecting theoretical physicist would have some kind of special-purpose workstation sitting around. I learned Unix on the astronomy department's Suns, before switching to a much funkier-looking AlphaStation when I switched departments. They were the last of a dying breed, though. By circa 2003 when they were up for replacement there was really no point in having one of these over a high-end commodity box running Linux. Circa 2011, my next "workstation" will probably be a MacBook Air. With the rise of cheap commodity clusters there's really no point in even trying to have signficiant number-crunching power on your own desk. I don't miss the Suns though. They were a bastard to use.