Graphical vector mini-supers. Unix and vax environments, with SUN ruling the roost and SGI crashing in. Multiple instances of what became things like knime.

Graphical vector mini-supers. Unix and vax environments, with SUN ruling the roost and SGI crashing in. Multiple instances of what became things like knime. X11 and multiple vendor-specific gui toolkits. Excellent vectorizing compilers for Fortran and C. 4 and 8 core multiprocessors. Granted, it wasn’t as fast but there was lots there which people probably forget. Software wise, there were research groups with all of the ml/ai areas in chemistry (Gasteiger, others) so I assume they were active elsewhere. The quants were starting upon Wall Street and they needed visualization systems to know whether their model is going up or down. Stereotactic imaging for medical uses, fluid dynamics and finite element analysis were leading to changes in car and airplane design, Microprocessors killed off this ecosystem - the pa-risc chip from HP could be a soft pc faster than a 486 could be a pc. But don’t think it wasn’t there. Hell, all of the foundation was laid by (mostly) hackers in the 60’s and 70’s that were building on now. It just used way less memory :-) And don’t forget the work from the folks at bell labs. And neat stuff like the blit.