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I love all the nostalgia, but the post doesn't really answer the most interesting part of the title: why do workstations matter? I was really hoping there was s

I love all the nostalgia, but the post doesn't really answer the most interesting part of the title: why do workstations matter? I was really hoping there was some revelation in there!

corysama 5y ago
Alan Kay attributes a big part of the advances of PARC to the custom workstations they built for themselves. They cost $20k(?) but ran much faster than off the shelf high-end machines at a time when Moore’s Law was accelerating CPU speed dramatically. He says it let them work on machines from the future so they had plenty of time to make currently-impossible software targeting where them common machines would be when they finished it.
- buescher 5y ago
  It also helps if you are Alan Kay or the other talents that were at PARC back then. What future would you create if you had a custom $100K (2022 dollars) workstation?
  - pavlov 5y ago
    The NVIDIA DGX Station A100 has a list price of $149k, I believe. It's a workstation that's advertised as an "AI data center in a box": https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-station-a100/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-station-a100/
    - buescher 5y ago
      That looks like it would be an absolute hoot to experiment with, but I don't know what I could possibly do with one that would generate a return on $150K. What would you do?
      - sbierwagen 5y ago
        In some circumstances making a hedge fund model 0.001% better would return 10x that. John Carmack tweeted about buying one a while back. I'm not sure if a DGX on your desk does anything for working with ML at the bleeding edge, though, since those all run on megaclusters of A100s or TPUs.
        buescher 5y ago
        What's he doing with it?
        sbierwagen 5y ago
        AI stuff: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2547632585471243&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2547632585...
  - luckydata 5y ago
    I think we tend to overestimate how "good" those people were. Yes they were definitely good professionals, but they happened to be in a very special place at a special time with very few constraints compared to how we work now. It was a lot easier for them to innovate than for any of us now.
    - buescher 5y ago
      Folks at PARC designed and built their own PDP-10 clone to get around internal politics. It's hard to overestimate the amount of talent concentrated there at the time. It always looks like all the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked. So, stop looking for low-hanging fruit.
      - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
        And they did it as a warm-up before tackling something difficult.
    - azinman2 5y ago
      They were working in a total vacuum. Computers were classically giant things that simply tabulated or ran physics simulations. To create an entire well articulated vision of HCI is extremely difficult and requires both creativity and technical competence. I would not make such statements that it was easier to innovate then. In fact, I’d say it’s way easier to innovate now that so much exists to play with and mix and match, not to mention the ability to have perspective on negatives of assumptions previously made that can be corrected.
      - retrocryptid 5y ago
        well... not a TOTAL vacuum. a number of the PARC people (thinking of Tesler & Kay) were intimately familiar with Englebart's work at SRI. When the ARC (Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at SRI) was winding down and PARC was staffing up, the people who left first were supposedly those who rejected the "brittleness" of the expert-focused software ARC developed. It's definitely true that the cost of implementing a frame buffer fell well into the affordable range as they were moving to PARC. And politics at PARC made it easy to say you were developing a system for "inexpert document managers." They were definitely exploring new ideas about HCI as PC hardware was emerging. But Larry Tessler was pretty clear that Lisa learned what not to do from looking at the Alto & Star. And the Alto & Star learned what not to do by looking at various bits of ARC software. And Engelbart was adamant his team not repeat the UI/UX mistakes of ITS. So sure... they were trailblazers, but they had a good idea of where they wanted to go.
- justinlloyd 5y ago
  I am currently working with a hardware start-up, that happens to have "some monies" in the bank to deliver what we need. And if I was asked to describe how the culture inside the company feels, I would say "like the early days of NeXT." There's money here to do what we want, there's technically smart guys in the room, nothing is off the table in terms of what we're willing to try, we have a vision of what we want to build, nobody is being an architecture astronaut, all of us have shipped product before and know what it takes. Where I am going with all this is that what we're trying to build, the consumer grade hardware to run it won't exist for two more years so we're having to use really beefy workstations in our day-to-day work. Not quite PARC level of built-from-scratch customization, but not exactly cheap consumer grade desktops either.
  - indigodaddy 5y ago
    Are you creating an OS and/or softball as well there?
    - justinlloyd 5y ago
      We are not creating a custom OS at this time. We have to be aware of the limits of what we can achieve given the size of our team and the desire to actually get to market in a timely fashion. That said, there's heavy customization of the OS we are using, along with some bare metal "OS? Where we're going we don't need no steenking OS" work. We're more focused on the h/w, the UI and UX that interfaces between the h/w and the user, and the graphics pipeline.
      - indigodaddy 5y ago
        Sounds interesting, thanks!
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    A long time ago I suggested developing on Xeon Phi-based workstations because, in order to run well on future computers, you need to be able to run on lots of slow cores. The idea kind of still holds. These days the cores are quite fast and running on one or two of them gives acceptable performance, but if you can manage to run on all cores, your software will be lightning fast.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
blihp 5y ago
They allow you to spend much less time thinking about resource constraints and/or performance optimization and just focus on what you're trying to get done and/or do more than would be possible with conventional systems. Workstations let you buy your way past many limitations. The closest example today would be people like developers, AI researchers, 3D designers and video editors buying high-end video cards (quite possibly multiple) running in Threadripper systems. They're paying up for GPU power and huge amounts of cores/RAM/IO bandwidth/whatever to either do something that isn't feasible on a lower end system or to complete their work much more quickly.
- Wistar 5y ago
  This is correct. I do video and 3D with a Threadripper 3990X with 128GB RAM and a 3090 because I don't want to even think about computational restraints. It is overkill for 95% of my work but, that other 5% where I am rendering something arduous, it pays off.
EricE 5y ago
I think an analogy to supercars is pretty relevant. They are a minuscule percentage of cars developed/sold but have a disproportionate influence on the car market overall. I'm sure there are analogies for a lot of other industries as well. Also - there is no cloud, just someone else's computer. Which is why I will never rely on something like a Chromebook, the web or other modern day equivalents of dumb terminals :)

I love all the nostalgia, but the post doesn't really answer the most interesting part of the title: why do workstations matter? I was really hoping there was some revelation in there!

corysama 5y ago

Alan Kay attributes a big part of the advances of PARC to the custom workstations they built for themselves. They cost $20k(?) but ran much faster than off the shelf high-end machines at a time when Moore’s Law was accelerating CPU speed dramatically. He says it let them work on machines from the future so they had plenty of time to make currently-impossible software targeting where them common machines would be when they finished it.

buescher 5y ago
It also helps if you are Alan Kay or the other talents that were at PARC back then. What future would you create if you had a custom $100K (2022 dollars) workstation?
- pavlov 5y ago
  The NVIDIA DGX Station A100 has a list price of $149k, I believe. It's a workstation that's advertised as an "AI data center in a box": https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-station-a100/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-station-a100/
  - buescher 5y ago
    That looks like it would be an absolute hoot to experiment with, but I don't know what I could possibly do with one that would generate a return on $150K. What would you do?
    - sbierwagen 5y ago
      In some circumstances making a hedge fund model 0.001% better would return 10x that. John Carmack tweeted about buying one a while back. I'm not sure if a DGX on your desk does anything for working with ML at the bleeding edge, though, since those all run on megaclusters of A100s or TPUs.
      - buescher 5y ago
        What's he doing with it?
        sbierwagen 5y ago
        AI stuff: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2547632585471243&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2547632585...
- luckydata 5y ago
  I think we tend to overestimate how "good" those people were. Yes they were definitely good professionals, but they happened to be in a very special place at a special time with very few constraints compared to how we work now. It was a lot easier for them to innovate than for any of us now.
  - buescher 5y ago
    Folks at PARC designed and built their own PDP-10 clone to get around internal politics. It's hard to overestimate the amount of talent concentrated there at the time. It always looks like all the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked. So, stop looking for low-hanging fruit.
    - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      And they did it as a warm-up before tackling something difficult.
  - azinman2 5y ago
    They were working in a total vacuum. Computers were classically giant things that simply tabulated or ran physics simulations. To create an entire well articulated vision of HCI is extremely difficult and requires both creativity and technical competence. I would not make such statements that it was easier to innovate then. In fact, I’d say it’s way easier to innovate now that so much exists to play with and mix and match, not to mention the ability to have perspective on negatives of assumptions previously made that can be corrected.
    - retrocryptid 5y ago
      well... not a TOTAL vacuum. a number of the PARC people (thinking of Tesler & Kay) were intimately familiar with Englebart's work at SRI. When the ARC (Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at SRI) was winding down and PARC was staffing up, the people who left first were supposedly those who rejected the "brittleness" of the expert-focused software ARC developed. It's definitely true that the cost of implementing a frame buffer fell well into the affordable range as they were moving to PARC. And politics at PARC made it easy to say you were developing a system for "inexpert document managers." They were definitely exploring new ideas about HCI as PC hardware was emerging. But Larry Tessler was pretty clear that Lisa learned what not to do from looking at the Alto & Star. And the Alto & Star learned what not to do by looking at various bits of ARC software. And Engelbart was adamant his team not repeat the UI/UX mistakes of ITS. So sure... they were trailblazers, but they had a good idea of where they wanted to go.
justinlloyd 5y ago
I am currently working with a hardware start-up, that happens to have "some monies" in the bank to deliver what we need. And if I was asked to describe how the culture inside the company feels, I would say "like the early days of NeXT." There's money here to do what we want, there's technically smart guys in the room, nothing is off the table in terms of what we're willing to try, we have a vision of what we want to build, nobody is being an architecture astronaut, all of us have shipped product before and know what it takes. Where I am going with all this is that what we're trying to build, the consumer grade hardware to run it won't exist for two more years so we're having to use really beefy workstations in our day-to-day work. Not quite PARC level of built-from-scratch customization, but not exactly cheap consumer grade desktops either.
- indigodaddy 5y ago
  Are you creating an OS and/or softball as well there?
  - justinlloyd 5y ago
    We are not creating a custom OS at this time. We have to be aware of the limits of what we can achieve given the size of our team and the desire to actually get to market in a timely fashion. That said, there's heavy customization of the OS we are using, along with some bare metal "OS? Where we're going we don't need no steenking OS" work. We're more focused on the h/w, the UI and UX that interfaces between the h/w and the user, and the graphics pipeline.
    - indigodaddy 5y ago
      Sounds interesting, thanks!
- rbanffy 5y ago
  A long time ago I suggested developing on Xeon Phi-based workstations because, in order to run well on future computers, you need to be able to run on lots of slow cores. The idea kind of still holds. These days the cores are quite fast and running on one or two of them gives acceptable performance, but if you can manage to run on all cores, your software will be lightning fast.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

blihp 5y ago

They allow you to spend much less time thinking about resource constraints and/or performance optimization and just focus on what you're trying to get done and/or do more than would be possible with conventional systems. Workstations let you buy your way past many limitations. The closest example today would be people like developers, AI researchers, 3D designers and video editors buying high-end video cards (quite possibly multiple) running in Threadripper systems. They're paying up for GPU power and huge amounts of cores/RAM/IO bandwidth/whatever to either do something that isn't feasible on a lower end system or to complete their work much more quickly.

Wistar 5y ago
This is correct. I do video and 3D with a Threadripper 3990X with 128GB RAM and a 3090 because I don't want to even think about computational restraints. It is overkill for 95% of my work but, that other 5% where I am rendering something arduous, it pays off.

EricE 5y ago

I think an analogy to supercars is pretty relevant. They are a minuscule percentage of cars developed/sold but have a disproportionate influence on the car market overall. I'm sure there are analogies for a lot of other industries as well. Also - there is no cloud, just someone else's computer. Which is why I will never rely on something like a Chromebook, the web or other modern day equivalents of dumb terminals :)