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Wow reading this "The most significant minicomputer vendor was a company called DEC: Digital Equipment Corporation." Made me feel old. In college circa mid nin

Wow reading this "The most significant minicomputer vendor was a company called DEC: Digital Equipment Corporation." Made me feel old. In college circa mid nineties SGI and DEC machines used to be the big machines. Both companies are gone.

bee_rider 5y ago
I wonder if it is still possible to buy systems branded SGI. I guess HP owns the brand now, but it has been through a couple acquisitions at this point, so it would be a real zombie brand at this point.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Yes - nothing of interest left, apart from some very old patent troll lawsuits. IMO it's more interesting just how dated the technology is. DEC and SGI made huge super-expensive machines (by modern standards) and I'm typing this on an iMac Pro which is somewhere between 1000 and 10000 times faster than a VAX 11/780 and would easily leave an SGI Octane in the dust. Even knowing Moore's Law, I don't know how many people expected that kind of progress back in the 80s or 90s.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    > I'm typing this on an iMac Pro which is somewhere between 1000 and 10000 times faster than a VAX 11/780 and would easily leave an SGI Octane in the dust. Now just imagine what a modern SGI Octane with all its custom silicon implemented in 10nm, with a modern MIPS processor built with modern technologies could be, every component finely tuned to work with all others into perfect coordination. How would it compare to a PC assembled from generic components?
    - mjevans 5y ago
      I hope that technological symphony is again reached when shrinking nodes is no longer a cheap escape hatch. It seems like we'll soon be there if we aren't already, but increasingly exotic and expensive fabrication methods have been delaying that for much of the last decade already. I suppose when '7nm' and smaller processes are economic enough for non-primary CPUs, hopefully also with rad hardened designs ready for use in the new space age, there will be interest in making both basic compute SoCs already optimized like this, and supercomputers constructed from variations on the same components.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

bee_rider 5y ago

I wonder if it is still possible to buy systems branded SGI. I guess HP owns the brand now, but it has been through a couple acquisitions at this point, so it would be a real zombie brand at this point.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Yes - nothing of interest left, apart from some very old patent troll lawsuits. IMO it's more interesting just how dated the technology is. DEC and SGI made huge super-expensive machines (by modern standards) and I'm typing this on an iMac Pro which is somewhere between 1000 and 10000 times faster than a VAX 11/780 and would easily leave an SGI Octane in the dust. Even knowing Moore's Law, I don't know how many people expected that kind of progress back in the 80s or 90s.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > I'm typing this on an iMac Pro which is somewhere between 1000 and 10000 times faster than a VAX 11/780 and would easily leave an SGI Octane in the dust. Now just imagine what a modern SGI Octane with all its custom silicon implemented in 10nm, with a modern MIPS processor built with modern technologies could be, every component finely tuned to work with all others into perfect coordination. How would it compare to a PC assembled from generic components?
  - mjevans 5y ago
    I hope that technological symphony is again reached when shrinking nodes is no longer a cheap escape hatch. It seems like we'll soon be there if we aren't already, but increasingly exotic and expensive fabrication methods have been delaying that for much of the last decade already. I suppose when '7nm' and smaller processes are economic enough for non-primary CPUs, hopefully also with rad hardened designs ready for use in the new space age, there will be interest in making both basic compute SoCs already optimized like this, and supercomputers constructed from variations on the same components.
deleted 5y ago
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