9 ms·

I miss the days of commercial UNIX workstations. Perhaps that’s because this happens to be when I was young.

Dig1t 4y ago
What is the difference between a commercial UNIX workstation and a Mac? Genuinely asking, I've never used a commercial UNIX workstation like you're describing.
- hapless 4y ago
  In the 80s and 90s, they were significantly faster and more capable than their PC / Mac analogues. Double or triple the speeds and feeds, ten times the price ;) By the 2000s the advantages had more or less vanished and the workstation SKUs were discontinued one by one.
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    PC’s were stuck with awful hardware for a long time, but the Mac story is a bit more complicated — once they became available, higher-end 68020/68030 Macs were sometimes competitive with workstations.
    - ajross 4y ago
      No. Mac II's showed up in the late 80's just as the workstation vendors were moving off 68k hardware and onto SPARC and MIPS. PA and POWER came along a few years after that, then Alpha a bit later still. Motorola never got back in the game, really, though Intel caught up with the release of the P6 in 1995.
      - hulitu 4y ago
        > Motorola never got back in the game I though POWER was born as a child of IBM and Motorola.
        mepian 4y ago
        PowerPC, not POWER: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance
    - fortran77 4y ago
      Absolutely not! The MacOS was terrible; no functioning virtual memory, no memory protection between processes.
      - lproven 4y ago
        This is only considering part of the question, which makes it a false comparison. Classic MacOS had pretty much the best UI on any mass-market computer ever made. And that's the part that its users saw all day every day, and interacted with, and which made Macs desirable. Not just the front-end of programs: this extended to how to install new programs, how to add drivers or other system components, how to add fonts; how to connect to printers; how to make or break drive connections to other machines; how to connect new drives, and how to remove them. All the daily tasks of running a computer. But UNIX people, with their gods-awful UI, didn't care about this then and they don't care about it now. UNIX UIs are better than they were but they are still very poor. The real problem is that all the visionary innovators got old and retired and their replacements don't have the overall vision and don't really understand how stuff works, so they randomly tweak things without understanding. So Mac OS X's UI was never as good as Classic's, and it's been getting worse and worse for 10-15Y. Read John Siracusa's excellent in-depth reviews of Mac OS X on Ars Technica for details. The generally accepted high point was Snow Leopard, 10.6, and it's been downhill since. Microsoft never had much of the plot, but what they had hit a high point around 1996-1996 and it's been downhill since. Now, as in the last decade, Windows is a UI train wreck. But still people bang on about largely irrelevant behind-the-scenes stuff, not understanding that it's the whole picture that matters, not just the UI but not just the backend either.
    - mistrial9 4y ago
      absolutely yes! depends on your model and use case .. workstation fans often have this reaction though. Please recall that performance is not one number. Someone/something has to write code in a language, invoke hardware well and efficiently, and return the results to a user or process. Drop-down menus meant that no way could the machine do math? hardly true.. Performance on benchmarks ? probably as the others say, you will never win like a horse race. Overall in the expanding world of digital signals, media and math ? yes.. the Motorola chips had access to RAM if you could get enough of it. RAM plus math gets you a lot of places. Virtual Memory is guaranteed RAM but at what cost? all things considered, yes the Motorola CPUs did bring something and it was a highly competitive time. edit right, add to that "digital audio signal processing" .. Virtual Memory paging was horribly obvious for Digital Audio, and that means stereo audio albums and digital audio soundtracks for movies, which was (and is) Big Business. Lots of hard math problems for geeks, lots of sales for business types.
  - rjsw 4y ago
    My PC from 1987 was competitive with any workstation of the time but a lot cheaper. A 386DX-25 with 16MB RAM, a TMS34010 GPU and ESDI disks.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_Graphics_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_Graphics_Arc... !
      - rjsw 4y ago
        Mine predated the TIGA standard, it is a NEC card. I ported GNU binutils to it then wrote some 34010 assembler functions for X11 to call to do basic 2D graphics operations.
    - lproven 4y ago
      It really was not. You were kidding yourself then and you still are. The year after that I bought an Acorn Archimedes A310. 8MHz ARM2. It was 4x faster in raw single-threaded integer computation than the top-end 80386DX 25MHz with L1 cache that IBM sold, and that was a $10,000 PC. It was about 10x quicker than your 16MHz machine... and it cost £800.
      - rjsw 4y ago
        Which version of UNIX did your A310 run?
        lproven 4y ago
        It didn't, and I don't see the relevance. The point was not the OS, it was the performance, wasn't it?
        rjsw 4y ago
        The point was the OS, that is what let you run workstation software of the time. Being able to add a lot (for the time) of RAM was important too, your A310 doesn't seem to be able to have 16MB. EDIT: This is a thread about UNIX.
- pvg 4y ago
  These days not much but personal computers were a lot less powerful (and less expensive) than UNIX workstations. In terms of experience though - think tricked out Linux desktop but with working sound.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    > In terms of experience though - think tricked out Linux desktop but with working sound. I've spent some time thinking about this, mostly in terms of "why do I like Solaris more than GNU/Linux, even in 2022?". I think it really does boil down to it being 1. a single coherent system, 2. including running on hardware that was designed to run it, 3. with paid support by a company that actually has skin in the game to make the thing work. (And in my case a certain amount of rose-tinted glasses.) IMO, the Bazaar can build amazing things at probably-lower cost (certainly lower per-party) and it has a diversity that is good, but the Cathedral can, in fact, Get Stuff Done and build a more coherent system. And when you're successfully selling workstations at $10k+ a pop you can afford to do high quality engineering:)
    - nine_k 4y ago
      So, returning to the question upthread: how a Mac is not a commercial Unix workstation? It checks all the boxes you listed.
      - pvg 4y ago
        It totally is. This was an explicit selling point when they originally announced the move to OS X. They bought a Unix workstation maker and were going to make macs that were also Unix workstations.
        runlevel1 4y ago
        Looks like Apple is still getting macOS versions UNIX® Certified, right up to Ventura: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
      - 4y ago
- defrost 4y ago
  My experience of mid 80s | early 90s Sun workstations was of rugged VMEbus boxes that could take the vibration of planes, trains, 4 wheel drives, heavy dust environments (with easy blow through to clean internal layouts), and the option of fully sheilded boxes, cables and monitors just in case the odd lightening strike or EMP burst happened nearby. Nice clean OS's .. with RISC ops that failed on misalignd data which encourage clean cache aware coding styles and programs that pumped data through fast (or simply didn't work at all). ie. Great dev boxes for cross platform coding - get it right on a Sun and it worked well pretty much across the POSIX space.
  - somat 4y ago
    Clean! clean is the last thing I would call the commercial unixen. I have a couple sgi boxes and irix is pretty wild and weedy. I picked up a sun box and had to replace soleris with openbsd after a week. If curious the straw that broke the camels back was that the official way to change the hostname was to reinstall the os, I found an unofficial way but it was involved to say the least. The commercial distributions tended to collect cruft without ever throwing any thing away(throwing things away may upset a paying customer that depended on the feature) linux is a cleanroom by comparison. and, as a good bsdite I consider linux an almost unusable mess.
    - defrost 4y ago
      > I picked up a sun box and had to replace soleris with openbsd after a week. Both the parent article and myself are talking about SunOS - the BSD based precursor to Slowaris . . . It's an interesting segue you make that strawman's to reinforce my point.
      - somat 4y ago
        A fair assessment, I have never used sunos, and whenever I hear about it, it is in the context of how much more crufty solaris was in comparison.
    - nineteen999 4y ago
      Huh? https://www.thegeekdiary.com/how-to-change-hostname-in-solaris-11/ https://www.thegeekdiary.com/how-to-change-hostname-in-solar... https://www.thegeekdiary.com/how-to-change-hostname-in-solaris/ https://www.thegeekdiary.com/how-to-change-hostname-in-solar...
- seanhunter 4y ago
  A mac is much better in almost every way, but that is no less than you would expect given 30+ years of evolution since the 80/90s. The bit you’re maybe missing is how different the standard dev process was back then to accommodate how slow build infra was. You (or at least I) typically started compiling something and went for a coffee or whatever because it would take a l o n g time to build anything. So often teams would have a setup where each member had a low-power desktop that was basically just an x terminal and everyone would run their actual builds on a team buildserver. If you had a proper workstation it meant you could generally build your own code directly on your workstation meaning you weren’t contending for resources on the build server with everyone else. So I remember in one team back then one guy left who had a sparc 10 on his desk, so my buddy grabbed that, I swapped from my terrible lunchbox LX to nab my friend’s sparc 5 and suddenly local builds were a possibility for me, meaning a huge increase in productivity.
  - TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
    And if you’re REALLY lucky, your company is STILL USING this approach, 30 years later! It’s slow, but it’s also down half the time!
- fulafel 4y ago
  In a typical academic or r&d lab setting they were very hacker friendly networked setups, where people would share scripts, installed software, and media. You could access files in each other's home directories from any machine (controlled by file permissions), automate things with cron jobs, someone would be administering the IRC server, the servers and workstations would be the same OS so people would naturally graduate to running a IRC or usenet server for the local users etc. (Probably it could also be a much less fun scenario than a Mac, with power tripping sysadmins handicapping usage, non-technical users having problems or feeling excluded, etc)
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  I'm just about old enough to remember "oldschool" Unix workstations (I used Suns at uni in the early 90s, a bit, even though I wasn't supposed to unless I was doing Applied Maths). This is when Windows 3 was new and 3.1 was on the horizon, which was a graphical frontend for DOS with some fairly janky apps - Paint was probably the highlight - and Macs were on System 6 with System 7 bringing stuff like Switcher built-in so if you had enough RAM you could actually have two programs loaded at the same time! They didn't quite multitask but they could, kind of, if they were expecting to. Using SunOS 4 at the time on machines with masses of RAM and disk space was a bit like how vans changed with the first-gen Ford Transit - it was quick and light and you didn't have to stretch halfway across the cab to get 1st gear. You could order one with a radio, and not only that but you could actually *hear* the radio at 70mph. And - it actually did 70mph! Comparing the SPARCStations we had back then to a modern Mac running OSX is a bit like comparing those first-gen Transits to a nice modern Merc Sprinter. It's still basically the same thing but it's a lot quicker and cleaner and the stereo has bluetooth and everything's bigger and faster and it's a hell of a lot cheaper.
pjmlp 4y ago
That is when I had my UNIX zealot phase, starting with Xenix, DG/UX,...., but then I got to discover the parallel universe from Xerox PARC, and felt sad that UNIX has won. Specially because many insist in using their systems as if UNIX V6 was released yesterday, NextSTEP and macOS being the exception, which isn't any surprise given how Steve Jobs looked at UNIX workstations.
- lproven 4y ago
  You are absolutely right. The thing I do not understand is why people favour updated 1970s-style UNIX, e.g. Linux and xBSD, when more modern sophisticated later Unixes are right there for the taking, such as Plan 9 and Inferno. My cynical suspicion is that it's because they are just too hard to understand. I know that I struggle to myself. The conceptual model of '70s UNIX, and (to me) horrible primitive tools such as Vi, are easier to understand than the richer, smarter OSes of the '80s (Plan 9, with integrated networking, proper namespaces, and the whole LAN as your workstation) and '90s (Inferno, which also abstracts away CPU architectures and replaces C with something cleaner and safer).
icedchai 4y ago
Same. In the mid 90's, I had a Sparc 10 at home for a while, as my main system (I bought it from a software company that went under.) What I really miss is the incredible "variety" of hardware back then. I remember working at a company where we had DEC Alphas, VAXes, Suns, HPUX systems, AIX boxes... Today everything is basically homogeneous.

What is the difference between a commercial UNIX workstation and a Mac? Genuinely asking, I've never used a commercial UNIX workstation like you're describing.

hapless 4y ago
In the 80s and 90s, they were significantly faster and more capable than their PC / Mac analogues. Double or triple the speeds and feeds, ten times the price ;) By the 2000s the advantages had more or less vanished and the workstation SKUs were discontinued one by one.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  PC’s were stuck with awful hardware for a long time, but the Mac story is a bit more complicated — once they became available, higher-end 68020/68030 Macs were sometimes competitive with workstations.
  - ajross 4y ago
    No. Mac II's showed up in the late 80's just as the workstation vendors were moving off 68k hardware and onto SPARC and MIPS. PA and POWER came along a few years after that, then Alpha a bit later still. Motorola never got back in the game, really, though Intel caught up with the release of the P6 in 1995.
    - hulitu 4y ago
      > Motorola never got back in the game I though POWER was born as a child of IBM and Motorola.
      - mepian 4y ago
        PowerPC, not POWER: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance
  - fortran77 4y ago
    Absolutely not! The MacOS was terrible; no functioning virtual memory, no memory protection between processes.
    - lproven 4y ago
      This is only considering part of the question, which makes it a false comparison. Classic MacOS had pretty much the best UI on any mass-market computer ever made. And that's the part that its users saw all day every day, and interacted with, and which made Macs desirable. Not just the front-end of programs: this extended to how to install new programs, how to add drivers or other system components, how to add fonts; how to connect to printers; how to make or break drive connections to other machines; how to connect new drives, and how to remove them. All the daily tasks of running a computer. But UNIX people, with their gods-awful UI, didn't care about this then and they don't care about it now. UNIX UIs are better than they were but they are still very poor. The real problem is that all the visionary innovators got old and retired and their replacements don't have the overall vision and don't really understand how stuff works, so they randomly tweak things without understanding. So Mac OS X's UI was never as good as Classic's, and it's been getting worse and worse for 10-15Y. Read John Siracusa's excellent in-depth reviews of Mac OS X on Ars Technica for details. The generally accepted high point was Snow Leopard, 10.6, and it's been downhill since. Microsoft never had much of the plot, but what they had hit a high point around 1996-1996 and it's been downhill since. Now, as in the last decade, Windows is a UI train wreck. But still people bang on about largely irrelevant behind-the-scenes stuff, not understanding that it's the whole picture that matters, not just the UI but not just the backend either.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    absolutely yes! depends on your model and use case .. workstation fans often have this reaction though. Please recall that performance is not one number. Someone/something has to write code in a language, invoke hardware well and efficiently, and return the results to a user or process. Drop-down menus meant that no way could the machine do math? hardly true.. Performance on benchmarks ? probably as the others say, you will never win like a horse race. Overall in the expanding world of digital signals, media and math ? yes.. the Motorola chips had access to RAM if you could get enough of it. RAM plus math gets you a lot of places. Virtual Memory is guaranteed RAM but at what cost? all things considered, yes the Motorola CPUs did bring something and it was a highly competitive time. edit right, add to that "digital audio signal processing" .. Virtual Memory paging was horribly obvious for Digital Audio, and that means stereo audio albums and digital audio soundtracks for movies, which was (and is) Big Business. Lots of hard math problems for geeks, lots of sales for business types.
- rjsw 4y ago
  My PC from 1987 was competitive with any workstation of the time but a lot cheaper. A 386DX-25 with 16MB RAM, a TMS34010 GPU and ESDI disks.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_Graphics_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_Graphics_Arc... !
    - rjsw 4y ago
      Mine predated the TIGA standard, it is a NEC card. I ported GNU binutils to it then wrote some 34010 assembler functions for X11 to call to do basic 2D graphics operations.
  - lproven 4y ago
    It really was not. You were kidding yourself then and you still are. The year after that I bought an Acorn Archimedes A310. 8MHz ARM2. It was 4x faster in raw single-threaded integer computation than the top-end 80386DX 25MHz with L1 cache that IBM sold, and that was a $10,000 PC. It was about 10x quicker than your 16MHz machine... and it cost £800.
    - rjsw 4y ago
      Which version of UNIX did your A310 run?
      - lproven 4y ago
        It didn't, and I don't see the relevance. The point was not the OS, it was the performance, wasn't it?
        rjsw 4y ago
        The point was the OS, that is what let you run workstation software of the time. Being able to add a lot (for the time) of RAM was important too, your A310 doesn't seem to be able to have 16MB. EDIT: This is a thread about UNIX.
pvg 4y ago
These days not much but personal computers were a lot less powerful (and less expensive) than UNIX workstations. In terms of experience though - think tricked out Linux desktop but with working sound.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > In terms of experience though - think tricked out Linux desktop but with working sound. I've spent some time thinking about this, mostly in terms of "why do I like Solaris more than GNU/Linux, even in 2022?". I think it really does boil down to it being 1. a single coherent system, 2. including running on hardware that was designed to run it, 3. with paid support by a company that actually has skin in the game to make the thing work. (And in my case a certain amount of rose-tinted glasses.) IMO, the Bazaar can build amazing things at probably-lower cost (certainly lower per-party) and it has a diversity that is good, but the Cathedral can, in fact, Get Stuff Done and build a more coherent system. And when you're successfully selling workstations at $10k+ a pop you can afford to do high quality engineering:)
  - nine_k 4y ago
    So, returning to the question upthread: how a Mac is not a commercial Unix workstation? It checks all the boxes you listed.
    - pvg 4y ago
      It totally is. This was an explicit selling point when they originally announced the move to OS X. They bought a Unix workstation maker and were going to make macs that were also Unix workstations.
      - runlevel1 4y ago
        Looks like Apple is still getting macOS versions UNIX® Certified, right up to Ventura: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
    - 4y ago
defrost 4y ago
My experience of mid 80s | early 90s Sun workstations was of rugged VMEbus boxes that could take the vibration of planes, trains, 4 wheel drives, heavy dust environments (with easy blow through to clean internal layouts), and the option of fully sheilded boxes, cables and monitors just in case the odd lightening strike or EMP burst happened nearby. Nice clean OS's .. with RISC ops that failed on misalignd data which encourage clean cache aware coding styles and programs that pumped data through fast (or simply didn't work at all). ie. Great dev boxes for cross platform coding - get it right on a Sun and it worked well pretty much across the POSIX space.
- somat 4y ago
  Clean! clean is the last thing I would call the commercial unixen. I have a couple sgi boxes and irix is pretty wild and weedy. I picked up a sun box and had to replace soleris with openbsd after a week. If curious the straw that broke the camels back was that the official way to change the hostname was to reinstall the os, I found an unofficial way but it was involved to say the least. The commercial distributions tended to collect cruft without ever throwing any thing away(throwing things away may upset a paying customer that depended on the feature) linux is a cleanroom by comparison. and, as a good bsdite I consider linux an almost unusable mess.
  - defrost 4y ago
    > I picked up a sun box and had to replace soleris with openbsd after a week. Both the parent article and myself are talking about SunOS - the BSD based precursor to Slowaris . . . It's an interesting segue you make that strawman's to reinforce my point.
    - somat 4y ago
      A fair assessment, I have never used sunos, and whenever I hear about it, it is in the context of how much more crufty solaris was in comparison.
  - nineteen999 4y ago
    Huh? https://www.thegeekdiary.com/how-to-change-hostname-in-solaris-11/ https://www.thegeekdiary.com/how-to-change-hostname-in-solar... https://www.thegeekdiary.com/how-to-change-hostname-in-solaris/ https://www.thegeekdiary.com/how-to-change-hostname-in-solar...
seanhunter 4y ago
A mac is much better in almost every way, but that is no less than you would expect given 30+ years of evolution since the 80/90s. The bit you’re maybe missing is how different the standard dev process was back then to accommodate how slow build infra was. You (or at least I) typically started compiling something and went for a coffee or whatever because it would take a l o n g time to build anything. So often teams would have a setup where each member had a low-power desktop that was basically just an x terminal and everyone would run their actual builds on a team buildserver. If you had a proper workstation it meant you could generally build your own code directly on your workstation meaning you weren’t contending for resources on the build server with everyone else. So I remember in one team back then one guy left who had a sparc 10 on his desk, so my buddy grabbed that, I swapped from my terrible lunchbox LX to nab my friend’s sparc 5 and suddenly local builds were a possibility for me, meaning a huge increase in productivity.
- TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  And if you’re REALLY lucky, your company is STILL USING this approach, 30 years later! It’s slow, but it’s also down half the time!
fulafel 4y ago
In a typical academic or r&d lab setting they were very hacker friendly networked setups, where people would share scripts, installed software, and media. You could access files in each other's home directories from any machine (controlled by file permissions), automate things with cron jobs, someone would be administering the IRC server, the servers and workstations would be the same OS so people would naturally graduate to running a IRC or usenet server for the local users etc. (Probably it could also be a much less fun scenario than a Mac, with power tripping sysadmins handicapping usage, non-technical users having problems or feeling excluded, etc)
Gordonjcp 4y ago
I'm just about old enough to remember "oldschool" Unix workstations (I used Suns at uni in the early 90s, a bit, even though I wasn't supposed to unless I was doing Applied Maths). This is when Windows 3 was new and 3.1 was on the horizon, which was a graphical frontend for DOS with some fairly janky apps - Paint was probably the highlight - and Macs were on System 6 with System 7 bringing stuff like Switcher built-in so if you had enough RAM you could actually have two programs loaded at the same time! They didn't quite multitask but they could, kind of, if they were expecting to. Using SunOS 4 at the time on machines with masses of RAM and disk space was a bit like how vans changed with the first-gen Ford Transit - it was quick and light and you didn't have to stretch halfway across the cab to get 1st gear. You could order one with a radio, and not only that but you could actually *hear* the radio at 70mph. And - it actually did 70mph! Comparing the SPARCStations we had back then to a modern Mac running OSX is a bit like comparing those first-gen Transits to a nice modern Merc Sprinter. It's still basically the same thing but it's a lot quicker and cleaner and the stereo has bluetooth and everything's bigger and faster and it's a hell of a lot cheaper.

pjmlp 4y ago

That is when I had my UNIX zealot phase, starting with Xenix, DG/UX,...., but then I got to discover the parallel universe from Xerox PARC, and felt sad that UNIX has won. Specially because many insist in using their systems as if UNIX V6 was released yesterday, NextSTEP and macOS being the exception, which isn't any surprise given how Steve Jobs looked at UNIX workstations.

lproven 4y ago
You are absolutely right. The thing I do not understand is why people favour updated 1970s-style UNIX, e.g. Linux and xBSD, when more modern sophisticated later Unixes are right there for the taking, such as Plan 9 and Inferno. My cynical suspicion is that it's because they are just too hard to understand. I know that I struggle to myself. The conceptual model of '70s UNIX, and (to me) horrible primitive tools such as Vi, are easier to understand than the richer, smarter OSes of the '80s (Plan 9, with integrated networking, proper namespaces, and the whole LAN as your workstation) and '90s (Inferno, which also abstracts away CPU architectures and replaces C with something cleaner and safer).

icedchai 4y ago

Same. In the mid 90's, I had a Sparc 10 at home for a while, as my main system (I bought it from a software company that went under.) What I really miss is the incredible "variety" of hardware back then. I remember working at a company where we had DEC Alphas, VAXes, Suns, HPUX systems, AIX boxes... Today everything is basically homogeneous.