7 ms·

I still remember when the engineering company I worked at obtained its first 486 PC - through acquisition of another company, no less. We reverently talked abo

I still remember when the engineering company I worked at obtained its first 486 PC - through acquisition of another company, no less. We reverently talked about "the 486" and it was stored behind a locked door. Only the most CPU-intensive jobs would be deemed worthy of CPU time on the beast. And then the CAD department bought a whole bunch of 486s to do PCB layout, and the mystique was gone.

jjkaczor 5y ago
My first job was working for a small retail/VAR shop - just me and my engineering-background boss/owner who specialized in CAD/CAM transitions for manufacturing. (Plus blueprint scanning/digitalization and vector conversion) Our very first order came in for an i486 - so excited, I grabbed all the components, headed into the backroom and built the machine. Once it was all together - I eagerly threw the power switch on... Darkness... the breaker blew, the lights were out... Well... turns out, I had rotated the CPU 180 degrees from it's required position. OMG... here I am a teenager and now I am going to have to pay for a $1200+ part? My boss calmly reseated the CPU correctly, and... it worked! We did a 5-day burn-in/benchmark with no problems, and never had any callbacks from the customer.
- dpwm 5y ago
  > Well... turns out, I had rotated the CPU 180 degrees from it's required position. OMG... here I am a teenager and now I am going to have to pay for a $1200+ part? I did something similar with an i486 DX4-100; I wasn’t so lucky: the power supply held up, the CPU smoked and it took out the motherboard. Thankfully this was well into the Pentium-II era, but it was still pretty devastating. If I recall correctly, it just slotted in the wrong way like it was meant to go; I guess modern CPU sockets have fixed that.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    > I guess modern CPU sockets have fixed that. Kinda. All that's stopping you from inserting a Ryzen CPU wrong way around is a 0.3mm copper pin that exists in one corner, but not the other. So there's still that worry of, "should I force it because it needs a bit of force, or should I not force it because I'll break it?" I think Core CPUs are the same way.
    - vizzier 5y ago
      Seems like knowing when to apply force is half the battle of building a PC. For reference, modern CPU installation should require NO force if done properly. Gravity alone should let settle into the socket. Gently attempting to twist it should yield no movement if it is seated correctly.
      - benjaminpv 5y ago
        The first computer I ever upgraded on my own was a P3 system (my family owned a few, we just never upgraded them without taking them to a shop). I knew if I broke something/did something wrong my parents would never forgive me, so before I tried upgrading the RAM I read all the documentation and a couple A+ books. The thing they all repeated was how applying force was absolutely the wrong thing, you should never need to force anything into place. Well, I'm sure you know how this turned out: none of the RAM I installed was seated in its socket properly so in a cold sweat I forced all of them into place. Still feel nervous about installing RAM to this day.
        BizarroLand 5y ago
        That KKKKRACK! when you put brand new ram into a brand new motherboard for the first time is the worst. Nothing gives me greater anxiety about the future of my new baby PC than that sound. It's the PC building equivalent of cutting the umbilical cord.
    - qball 5y ago
      Intel CPUs are not the same way, and haven't been for nearly 20 years. The pins are on the motherboard, and the CPU has lands; hence the name 'Land Grid Array' (starting with the LGA775). Most of AMD's CPUs are still of the PGA (Pin Grid Array) type; but it's worth noting that this isn't true for Socket AM5, which is itself an LGA socket, and the socket for the Threadrippers has been LGA since its inception.
bitwize 5y ago
Back in the day, if you were a top tier animation, video game, graphics, or CAD shop and you could afford it, you bought an SGI workstation. One workstation. For your entire company if you were small and boutique enough. They cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop, but they could do 3D accelerated graphics like no other computer could. Today even the rinky-dink Intel GPU in an HP Stream has more oomph than those SGI beasts, and people doing visualization work just buy PCs with NVIDIA cards. They can get pricey, but not top-end SGI pricey.
- dhosek 5y ago
  My first time I worked on an SGI workstation, I remember running TeX on it. I thought nothing happened because the process that took around 10 seconds on my 486 tower ran so quickly that the window didn't even scroll: It just repainted with the new output.
- timthorn 5y ago
  I did my work experience at SGI the week that the first Reality Center was opened. A side room held racks of Power Onyx and Infinite Reality2 tin to drive the wraparound projection screen, and there were some very impressive demos. Six years later I was at a university seminar where one of the exact same demos was shown off, running on a laptop.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  There were SGI workstations in the late 1990s-early 2000s with the equivalent of a full computer cluster inside; the IRIX operating system running on them managed to expose a single-system programming model where a single global address space and shared-memory support was provided by software, abstracting away the separate per-node RAM in the cluster. Linux is still quite far from doing anything like that, though container support provides a required foundation for any such feature, and is already paving the way for intermediate steps such as process checkpointing and migration across hosts.
jscheel 5y ago
I still remember asking for a mathematical co-processor for my birthday so I could run CAD at home (my family owned a tool and die company, so I got to see all the cool tech they were using).

jjkaczor 5y ago

My first job was working for a small retail/VAR shop - just me and my engineering-background boss/owner who specialized in CAD/CAM transitions for manufacturing. (Plus blueprint scanning/digitalization and vector conversion) Our very first order came in for an i486 - so excited, I grabbed all the components, headed into the backroom and built the machine. Once it was all together - I eagerly threw the power switch on... Darkness... the breaker blew, the lights were out... Well... turns out, I had rotated the CPU 180 degrees from it's required position. OMG... here I am a teenager and now I am going to have to pay for a $1200+ part? My boss calmly reseated the CPU correctly, and... it worked! We did a 5-day burn-in/benchmark with no problems, and never had any callbacks from the customer.

dpwm 5y ago
> Well... turns out, I had rotated the CPU 180 degrees from it's required position. OMG... here I am a teenager and now I am going to have to pay for a $1200+ part? I did something similar with an i486 DX4-100; I wasn’t so lucky: the power supply held up, the CPU smoked and it took out the motherboard. Thankfully this was well into the Pentium-II era, but it was still pretty devastating. If I recall correctly, it just slotted in the wrong way like it was meant to go; I guess modern CPU sockets have fixed that.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  > I guess modern CPU sockets have fixed that. Kinda. All that's stopping you from inserting a Ryzen CPU wrong way around is a 0.3mm copper pin that exists in one corner, but not the other. So there's still that worry of, "should I force it because it needs a bit of force, or should I not force it because I'll break it?" I think Core CPUs are the same way.
  - vizzier 5y ago
    Seems like knowing when to apply force is half the battle of building a PC. For reference, modern CPU installation should require NO force if done properly. Gravity alone should let settle into the socket. Gently attempting to twist it should yield no movement if it is seated correctly.
    - benjaminpv 5y ago
      The first computer I ever upgraded on my own was a P3 system (my family owned a few, we just never upgraded them without taking them to a shop). I knew if I broke something/did something wrong my parents would never forgive me, so before I tried upgrading the RAM I read all the documentation and a couple A+ books. The thing they all repeated was how applying force was absolutely the wrong thing, you should never need to force anything into place. Well, I'm sure you know how this turned out: none of the RAM I installed was seated in its socket properly so in a cold sweat I forced all of them into place. Still feel nervous about installing RAM to this day.
      - BizarroLand 5y ago
        That KKKKRACK! when you put brand new ram into a brand new motherboard for the first time is the worst. Nothing gives me greater anxiety about the future of my new baby PC than that sound. It's the PC building equivalent of cutting the umbilical cord.
  - qball 5y ago
    Intel CPUs are not the same way, and haven't been for nearly 20 years. The pins are on the motherboard, and the CPU has lands; hence the name 'Land Grid Array' (starting with the LGA775). Most of AMD's CPUs are still of the PGA (Pin Grid Array) type; but it's worth noting that this isn't true for Socket AM5, which is itself an LGA socket, and the socket for the Threadrippers has been LGA since its inception.

bitwize 5y ago

Back in the day, if you were a top tier animation, video game, graphics, or CAD shop and you could afford it, you bought an SGI workstation. One workstation. For your entire company if you were small and boutique enough. They cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop, but they could do 3D accelerated graphics like no other computer could. Today even the rinky-dink Intel GPU in an HP Stream has more oomph than those SGI beasts, and people doing visualization work just buy PCs with NVIDIA cards. They can get pricey, but not top-end SGI pricey.

dhosek 5y ago
My first time I worked on an SGI workstation, I remember running TeX on it. I thought nothing happened because the process that took around 10 seconds on my 486 tower ran so quickly that the window didn't even scroll: It just repainted with the new output.
timthorn 5y ago
I did my work experience at SGI the week that the first Reality Center was opened. A side room held racks of Power Onyx and Infinite Reality2 tin to drive the wraparound projection screen, and there were some very impressive demos. Six years later I was at a university seminar where one of the exact same demos was shown off, running on a laptop.
zozbot234 5y ago
There were SGI workstations in the late 1990s-early 2000s with the equivalent of a full computer cluster inside; the IRIX operating system running on them managed to expose a single-system programming model where a single global address space and shared-memory support was provided by software, abstracting away the separate per-node RAM in the cluster. Linux is still quite far from doing anything like that, though container support provides a required foundation for any such feature, and is already paving the way for intermediate steps such as process checkpointing and migration across hosts.

jscheel 5y ago

I still remember asking for a mathematical co-processor for my birthday so I could run CAD at home (my family owned a tool and die company, so I got to see all the cool tech they were using).