9 ms·

What did Unix fans learn from the end of Unix workstations?

91 points by lproven 4y ago

gumboza 4y ago
I learned that Windows NT/2000 was considerably cheaper, had a much shorter lead time on hardware, ran the same software, could be run by mere mortals thus had a better ROI.
- lproven 4y ago
  That is why SGI developed a range of non-PC compatible x86 workstations, long before Apple did the same. http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/507/SGI-320-Visual-Workstation/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/507/SGI-320-Visual-Wo... http://www.sgistuff.net/hardware/systems/vw320540.html http://www.sgistuff.net/hardware/systems/vw320540.html
  - wil421 4y ago
    I saw someone selling something similar to your first link on my local Craigslist years ago. He wanted more than I was willing to spend. There was also an SGI sever that was huge, loud, and had crazy power requirements. The price was cheap but power costs were way too much for a mortal to run.
  - pharaohgeek 4y ago
    And, considering what other PCs looked like at the time, they were beautiful machines! Everything else was just a beige box.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      Even today. Well the boxes are black now (sometimes white), but never the beautiful colors SGI had. I wish someone made a case that looked that nice today. Or maybe I have bad taste, but I don't care, I still liked their purple.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
      Actually there were some nice beige boxes then, also black(with some silver applications), or even colored. Very streamlined design. And you could actually sit, or even stand on them. They were just rare. But you could get them. But since the PC-segment of the market was the low end, that was more work and unusual.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Its too bad SGI couldn't figure out how to make it. They made some beautiful hardware.
  - kanwisher 4y ago
    Pretty sure they made x86 machine so close to their death it didn't matter. Also the machines only ran windows not Irix (their unix)
  - somat 4y ago
    And sgi still could not compete, the basic problem was they were(at the begining) 5 years ahead of everyone else, but were 10 times as expensive, if that was worth it to you you would buy it, however due to the economy of scale there was a lot of money in those terrible "pc's" and not only were they were catching up quick they were a lot more inexpensive. So as a last ditch effort sgi moves to the intel arcitechure chips but now have nothing to differentiate them, still cost too much, and did not make the move to personal music players that saved apple. In hindsight, sgi as an independent computer manufacture could could never have won against the cheap fast hardware from intel vendors, but damn do I miss them, the hardware was always amazingly stylish, performant and cool, and they put a lot of effort into the irix desktop environment. I do have to admit that irix was weird as hell underneath, but I think that is the end result of any commercial operating system, windows, solaris, macos are all very weird underneath as well. I am a bsd guy at heart so that is my gold standard for a logical consistent os, but even linux is straightforward and simple compared to the commercial os's, something about being able to poke around in the innards make for better looking innards. is the best I can come up with.
- abudabi123 4y ago
  Is there a running total and cost of totally failed projects hosted on the Sun Java/Microsoft Windows stack that rarely gets media scrutiny?
  - gumboza 4y ago
    Ironically I actually worked for one. Operations team were windows only. Software team were java only. $12.2m wasted on not delivering an ERP system which was eventually replaced with SAP which cost twice as much and run on some Oracle stuff. SAP got replaced last year with custom software on .Net on AWS by 4 people in only 9 months. On the original project I was the Unix expert and not needed at all so I played Solitaire for 6 months and got paid for it.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Why Java? There are tons of Fortune 500 running .NET and IIS powered websites out there. I know for sure some european airlines are running their ticket systems in such stacks. If you know how to debug ASP.NET applications you will eventually discover them.
- awiesenhofer 4y ago
  Interesting, what did you use before/after?
  - gumboza 4y ago
    Before Solaris on Ultra 30. After Windows 2000 Compaq Workstations. Software demands were EE/EDA stuff like Cadence, Zukon.
mhd 4y ago
This seems more about retrocomputing than a history of the lessons of the death of workstations and their vendors. Which is sad, because I think there's a lot to bring to mind. Although I'd argue that the CDE "collaboration" was mostly vendors giving up hope once they lost to Windows. And hope, as opposed to design skills, is something the OSS sphere has a lot. Interest in old computing stuff stretches from Altairs to Pentium IV gaming rigs. People in a horribly overpaid industry pay good bucks to satisfy their nostalgia.
- unixhero 4y ago
  Overpaid? Nah... I got all of mine for about 50usd each
- lproven 4y ago
  [Article author here] > This seems more about retrocomputing than a history of the lessons of the death of workstations and their vendors. Little bit, yes. I highly recommend following the link and reading Holwerda's article which inspired this. HN discussions on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33948573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33948573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33953816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33953816
- Roark66 4y ago
  It is not just nostalgia. I recently bought a dual core Pentium 2.2Ghz motherboard with a cpu and ram plus a half height desktop case(with an itx PSU) from the same era all including shipping for $15. Out those $15 almost $10 was shipping. Why? Because the motherboard has sata ports and I needed a cheap, low power dvr for my security cameras. I then got a 1tb sata drive for about $12 including shipping(shipping is all within one EU country so it is pretty cheap). What does this have to do with retro computing? Well, if retro enthusiasts didn't exist those parts would most likely go to be recycled already. They all came out from a decade old business PCs and I remember the time when people would pay me to take them away. In some sense it is a result of raspberry pi shortages and resulting exorbitant prices that people are much more likely to use old pc hardware for stuff they would use a raspberry pi before. Before anyone comments on power consumption let me say it is possible to run a lot of pc hardware under clocked and undervolted to reach some really low power consumption levels.
unixhero 4y ago
Well Corrected, True: OpenVMS has an Intel build made public Source: https://vmssoftware.com/about/openvmsx86/ https://vmssoftware.com/about/openvmsx86/ They don't offer hobbyist licenses, which is an absolutely braindead decision. IBM AIX is still developed Linux added support to SGI Octane machines It is not ENTIRELY DEAD edit: This was a wrong statement made by me: "Wrong: HP HPUX has an Intel build in the pipelines", my memory failed me. Corrected above.
- lproven 4y ago
  > HP HPUX has an Intel build in the pipelines It does? That's news to me. And to the Internet in general AFAICS. [[Citation needed]]
  - unixhero 4y ago
    You are correct, see my modified statement in my original comment. VMS, not HP-UX
    - lproven 4y ago
      Oh, I know about that! :-) I wrote about that months ago, when it reached shipping status. https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/10/openvms_92/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/10/openvms_92/ I was a VMS sysadmin in the early 1990s. This was very pleasing news.
  - chasil 4y ago
    There was an internal x86 port of HP-UX that was never released. https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/23/hp_project_blackbird_redwood_hp_ux/ https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/23/hp_project_blackbird_...
    - lproven 4y ago
      OK, that's interesting. I wasn't an employee at the Reg back then and I missed that one.
crmd 4y ago
This is painful to read because I'm guilty of it. I left an SGI Onyx, a Sun Ultra 80, a Sun Ultra 1E, and a Sun A1000 JBOD in the basement of a house I was renting in 2003 because I couldn't be bothered to hump the gear up a flight of stairs. I would love to have some of these in my office now, and once in a while hear the Onyx starting up and see that "Welcome to Reality" boot screen. Good times.
- b112 4y ago
  You should disclose this address, I could be the next tenant, they are likely still there.
- gumboza 4y ago
  I got the pangs back in 2003 and managed to snag a SPARCserver 1000E with full disk array. After spending 2 days getting it up and then a 3 months using it as a workstation, I got the electricity bill. That ended my interest in running vintage kit...
  - systems_glitch 4y ago
    The big stuff definitely can't run full-time if you actually pay for your electricity/care about use levels! A friend acquired a Sun Enterprise...4500? back when they were merely obsolete and not collector stuff, and attempted to run it as his home fileserver (he had several disk shelves). The $400 increase in electric bill put him off that! On the other hand, something like a SPARCstation IPX can run all day for not too much money, and runs the best Sun operating system, SunOS 4.1.4 :P
- kelp 4y ago
  I had a NeXT Station with monitor and keyboard, Sun SPARCstation 1, 2, and 5. Let them all go for cheap in the mid 00s because I didn’t want them taking up space.
  - pm215 4y ago
    There was a period where that kind of kit was usefully usable as (effectively) an X terminal -- you could put Linux on it, and it had a good quality CRT that you would otherwise have to pay a fair amount for. I did that in the late 90s and early 2000s with a SPARCstation 2 starting when I was in university. (I actually submitted a floating-point-emulation patch to the Linux kernel because otherwise the X server had a habit of crashing when it encountered a denormal number...) However, a couple of things made them fall out of that "vintage but still useful" bracket: - they fell off the bottom of the "supported by Linux distros" list, so you were running something that wasn't getting security or bug fix updates any more - LCD monitors got better and cheaper, so running a big 19 or 21 inch trinitron CRT was no longer the best available graphics experience - at least for me personally, my disposable income for buying nice monitors went up ;-) Machines in the "are you running a private museum collection" category are less exciting. My SS2 ended up in in the skip when I had to do a house move, I think.
exabrial 4y ago
That we need them back. The only ‘Unix workstation’ brand available right now in large quantity is Mac. Up until about four years ago was actually wasn’t a bad thing but with glued together parts, declining operating system quality, apple’s war on ports, in general obsession over stupid features with quality becoming a second rate citizen, and alternative is needed and people would actually buy it.
- wil421 4y ago
  Other *Nix OSes lack polish and just works stuff that comes with MacOS. I tried Kubuntu because of some comments I saw on HN and Reddit. I don’t really care to put a hentai skin on my UI but I think KDE has more polish than others. There were still some slight jankyness with the mouse and trackpad. Still not sure if they’ve solved Hdpi display issues. Windows mouse and trackpad movements are still second to MacOS but it lacks the weirdness I get on Linux.
  - ben7799 4y ago
    All these 1990s Unix workstations lacked polish compared to Mac OS too. They were rock solid stable whereas Mac OS 9 was incredibly unstable back in the 1990s. But usability for the user was atrocious on a lot of these machines, and they were often 10x more expensive than a PC or Mac. Linux was already more "polished" than most of these commercial Unix machines by 1996-1997. I used SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, DEC Unix, SCO, and more in one of my first jobs. Back then those Unix machines were all desktops. So was linux for the most part, although it was certainly possible to setup a Linux laptop by then. A lot of the stuff that Linux lags on today compared to Mac OS like graphics acceleration, power management, battery life, external/internal monitor switching, etc.. were kind of irrelevant back then as the machines just sat on a desk and you didn't move them around, there was no wireless, and graphics acceleration was in it's infancy. (You could get accelerators on the Unix machines but they cost 10s of thousands.) But out of the box a bunch of those Unix workstations would have stupidly broken stuff and you'd be spending a bunch of time fixing configuration and installing software before you could feel productive on the machines. Stupid stuff like opening a terminal and the key mappings were not even configured! You'd try to do something and even the backspace key would be broken. IRIX was the most polished in my memory. The last Sun machine I had at work was in 2003-2004. But I was doing a lot on Windows at that point. It was a few more years before places I worked started realizing OSX could do it all. Around 2010 or so I remember being shocked when we dropped support for Solaris for the product I worked on. When we had first started supporting linux (something I had worked on) it was edgy, just a few years laster all the customers had dropped all the commercial unix variants and only wanted linux support.
t312227 4y ago
idk ... * the mass-produced "descendants" of "IBM PC-AT compatible machines" got powerfull enough to replace those workstations which carried a hefty price-tag * proprietary UNIX-OSes where doomed - thanks to FOSS / linux / *BSD * again: thanks to linux / *BSD we could do "serious" work with cheap of-the-shelf hardware ...
- sumtechguy 4y ago
  Cheap off the shelf is important. I worked at a mac/pc shop in the mid 90s. To kit out a mac dev was easily 25,000. I could do a similar pc dev for about 2500. If I remember correctly sun was in similar ballpark numbers as the mac. I could tell even then once linux/bsd got its act together it would eat the server space as MS was starting to charge eye eyepopping numbers per user for network access on their servers. Cheap is not that big of a deal when you are working on a multi million dollar proj and there are 1-2 devs and maybe 1-2 users. But scale that past 20-30 and the numbers add up fast.
  - acdha 4y ago
    > I worked at a mac/pc shop in the mid 90s. To kit out a mac dev was easily 25,000. I could do a similar pc dev for about 2500. Those numbers are off by an order of magnitude unless you lived somewhere with really hefty tariffs. You were probably looking at $2-6K for a PC and $3-8k for Mac depending on what you needed — most of the times when people did price comparisons they forgot to spec out equivalent builds so you'd have, say, a Mac with a CD-ROM, ethernet, high-quality video and audio being compared to a PC with basic sound hardware, no network card, and a lower-res video card. Even a NeXT cube wasn't $25K unless you bought three of them. Sun, SGI, etc. were higher and that was in no small part because they had the enterprise sales model where you had to call a sales person and negotiate a corporate purchase.
michaelhoffman 4y ago
> Please, never ever throw away working kit. Someone will always take it… Unless it's a CRT monitor. No one wants those.
- vereis 4y ago
  Depending on the model I'd take one!
- Zachsa999 4y ago
  Is this a ironic? I'm hearing about many retro gamers that love these
  - systems_glitch 4y ago
    Seriously, some of them sell $500 USD and up, before shipping, nowadays.
- abruzzi 4y ago
  I did ditch my 3 SGI Sony Trinitron 21 inch monitors. The were the pinnacle of CRTs in my experience. I do still have a couple O2s, 3 or 4 Octane 2s, and a Fuel in my garage.
  - ff317 4y ago
    I don't have it anymore, but for many years I kept an old Nokia CRT that I considered to be the pinnacle of the CRTs I had used. It was probably purchased in the late 1990s, something like (from googling) the Nokia 447xpro model. They used Trinitron screens, but Nokia also added really nice software for the on-screen control/setup stuff. I miss the old Nokia (their early GSM phones too!).
  - simonh 4y ago
    Enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNQtQWjX-sA&t=222s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNQtQWjX-sA&t=222s
- bityard 4y ago
benreesman 4y ago
At the time when “workstations” were phasing out the key thing was to have a GNU user land. I’ve disagreed with those folks plenty since but that shit was untouchable at the time.
cramjabsyn 4y ago
I learned that decommissioned sun pizzaboxes with huge displays could be had for free, and that they ran linux.
systems_glitch 4y ago
I have strong hopes for stuff like the Talos II workstation and the rise of RISC V, coupled with the decline of consumer desktop PCs, resulting in the return of UNIX workstations.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  Can a Mac Pro be similarly configured?
  - systems_glitch 4y ago
    Not sure, but "only ready-to-go UNIX-like" (OS X had not yet been certified as UNIX) was why $previous_job had 27" iMacs at every workstation.
hulitu 4y ago
> What did Unix fans learn from the end of Unix workstations? That greed (the promise of Itanium) can destroy a lot of things. Now CAD runs (or better, it tries to) on Windows and the experience is atrocious. That HP from 2 great architectures (Alpha, PA-Risc) made none, didn't help either.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  > Now CAD runs ... on Windows and the experience is atrocious. Well, maybe Windows is now atrocious, but at the time Windows was murdering Unix workstations, Windows was greatly superior. When the shop I was working for at the time switched our Pro/ENGINEER hardware from SGI to whitebox PCs running Windows NT it was like a miracle. Everything that was horrible in the day-to-day of using IRIX stopped, and suddenly our workstations were useful for more than just running Pro/E. We could run Excel and whatnot. And a dual Pentium Pro was about fifty bajillion times faster than anything MIPS ever made.
- classichasclass 4y ago
  What do you mean by "HP made none"? There were absolutely great HP PA-RISC workstations. I have a C8000 here which with dual PA-8900s was a beast by then-contemporary standards, but there were all kinds of HP PA desktops. While HPaq didn't make Alpha workstations themselves, others did (there's a 164LX here, running Tru64).
  - hulitu 4y ago
    I meant that HP made from 2 -> zero, none. ALPHA is gone, PA-RISC is gone.
mtillman 4y ago
My first professional computer was an SGI O2. The thing that bothered me at the time was how completely closed the architecture was. It costs hundreds of dollars to buy compilers for example. Linux was an amazing thing in comparison because almost everything I needed to do my job was free. I never took Windows seriously so I’ve not used it. MSFT had far better sales reps at the time though from what I recall.
- kanwisher 4y ago
  I got my first c++ compiler for windows practically free with a book. I think full version of visual studio was $100 when I was first learning to code in early 90s. There were tons of free ware compilers for dos. Unix was basically impossible for anyone without a corporate job
- jeffbee 4y ago
  That seems like an inconsistent point. You also had to buy the Windows compiler.
  - speed_spread 4y ago
    Windows software had the advantage of popularity, there were always "unlocked" professional tools floating around if you had a modem and knew what number to dial. Unix tools tended to be not only rare and proprietary, but suffered from a lack of l33t hacking scene to remove their pervasive licence files requirements.
- justin66 4y ago
  > The thing that bothered me at the time was how completely closed the architecture was. It costs hundreds of dollars to buy compilers for example. It cost tens of thousands of dollars to buy an O2.
- bcrl 4y ago
  That was the way things were back in the 1980s. The only reason I managed to gain any experience programming in C on my Amiga is because one of my uncles bought me a $400 compiler to use (Aztec C). Things became easier in the 1990s as gcc improved and was ported to virtually every architecture on the planet. Richard Stallman was right to focus on a C compiler as a prerequisite to building the rest of the free software ecosystem.
trollerator23 4y ago
Can a Macbook Air be considered a "Unix workstation" ?
- jckahn 4y ago
  I don’t see why it couldn’t.
- fkgmeqnb 4y ago
  Of course. Technically speaking, the Macs are the last commercial UNIX workstations.
- flyinghamster 4y ago
  Absolutely - a very portable one, but modern Macs would absolutely qualify (and blow those classics out of the water in both computing power and low electricity consumption.
- thesuitonym 4y ago
  The Open Group seems to think so: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3683.htm https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3683.htm
- cth 4y ago
  Several years ago while at a university for CS, I was doing a senior class where I was doing whatever an assigned professor wanted me to help with. I was given two identical ThinkPads and a mid-2012 MacBook Pro and told to figure out a network partitioning problem involving virtual machines. Since the ThinkPads were running Windows, those were pretty forgettable. But as soon as I opened up the MacBook Pro and turned it on, my first thought was "This is a workstation." At the time my personal laptop was a 11" MacBook Air. Currently I use a 2014 Mac mini and a mid-2012 MBP, which I bought used because of that faithful encounter. I've never been able to elicit that initial reaction I had to the MBP since owning one myself. It's one of those things like how a single bite of someone else's food tastes better than the whole dish you end up ordering for yourself. As an aside, I bought a SPARCstation IPC for $25 from someone on IRC around 2001.
manv1 4y ago
"Unix is a lifestyle. A unix workstation was just an expression of that lifestyle."
- manv1 4y ago
  I never did get an E450 as a side table. Those things looked really great.
johnklos 4y ago
It's good we're having discussions like these. People tend to oversimplify history, so young people may end up with different ideas about how things were then than how they actually were. It's not only important to bring lessons from the Unix workstation era of computing to the present and to the future, it's also important to realize which lessons we've already learned. Does your video game make incredibly heavy use of your GPU? Who do you think was deeply integrating GPUs in to their OSes and software in the '90s? TCP/IP networking? Where do people think that originated and matured? One lesson most people now don't know much about is the quality of well-built hardware. Most people are aware that there's mainframe hardware, which is just worlds different than what we commonly see, then there's everything else. But in the Unix workstation era, much of the hardware was build with a different set of priorities - cost-cutting really wasn't a thing for most of the hardware, which is why VAXen and Alpha machines are often still running today. (A lot of Sun and some SGI hardware, though, was built like personal computers of the time, and have a higher failure / repair rate.) I wish it was possible to pay more for hardware and get components that are just made measurably better than common hardware. If you've ever seen the traces on a VAXStation or an AlphaServer, you'd know what I mean. We can, sorta - we can buy faster memory and run it slower, we can manually overprovision our SSDs, et cetera, but it's just not part of the market (and x86 servers have a very high failure rate, so I'm not talking about them). I still have my AlphaServer DS25 colocated, running public services, compiling NetBSD pkgsrc packages, et cetera. The hardware is incredibly high quality.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > I wish it was possible to pay more for hardware and get components that are just made measurably better than common hardware. I do too, but I just don't see it happening with the market. After a company has established a reputation for quality, it's too tempting for a business leader to cut corners and reap a short-term windfall before their customers figure out they're not getting what they're paying for.
  - kjellsbells 4y ago
    I find it mildly interesting that there is no elite tier of hardware available, like the equivalent of a super fancy watch or some fabulously expensive Japanese woodworking tools that you pass on to your children. You'd think that with so much money sloshing around the Valley in the last 20 years, someone would be making super high-end, artisanal hardware.
unxmaal 4y ago
The SGI Users Group is actively working on porting (relatively) current Linux software to IRIX. SGUG-RSE includes over 2700 packages ported from Fedora Core 31 SRPMs. https://github.com/sgidevnet/sgug-rse https://github.com/sgidevnet/sgug-rse for all 3 of you with SGI machines here.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
They learned that you can be pecked to death by ducks. Context: When PCs were starting to reach useful levels of ability, people started saying that PCs were going to replace workstations. In response, someone at SGI published an article titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks", arguing that PCs would never kill the workstation market. Then dual processor PCs started happening, and he published a sequel, literally titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks With Two Bills". And then the ducks pecked SGI to death.
aliqot 4y ago
As the drift away from general purpose computing intensifies, we'll see more of this mainframe/thinclient model, but we call it cloud/mobile now. Only a matter of time before our workstations are back.

91 points by lproven 4y ago

I learned that Windows NT/2000 was considerably cheaper, had a much shorter lead time on hardware, ran the same software, could be run by mere mortals thus had a better ROI.

lproven 4y ago
That is why SGI developed a range of non-PC compatible x86 workstations, long before Apple did the same. http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/507/SGI-320-Visual-Workstation/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/507/SGI-320-Visual-Wo... http://www.sgistuff.net/hardware/systems/vw320540.html http://www.sgistuff.net/hardware/systems/vw320540.html
- wil421 4y ago
  I saw someone selling something similar to your first link on my local Craigslist years ago. He wanted more than I was willing to spend. There was also an SGI sever that was huge, loud, and had crazy power requirements. The price was cheap but power costs were way too much for a mortal to run.
- pharaohgeek 4y ago
  And, considering what other PCs looked like at the time, they were beautiful machines! Everything else was just a beige box.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Even today. Well the boxes are black now (sometimes white), but never the beautiful colors SGI had. I wish someone made a case that looked that nice today. Or maybe I have bad taste, but I don't care, I still liked their purple.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
    Actually there were some nice beige boxes then, also black(with some silver applications), or even colored. Very streamlined design. And you could actually sit, or even stand on them. They were just rare. But you could get them. But since the PC-segment of the market was the low end, that was more work and unusual.
- bluGill 4y ago
  Its too bad SGI couldn't figure out how to make it. They made some beautiful hardware.
- kanwisher 4y ago
  Pretty sure they made x86 machine so close to their death it didn't matter. Also the machines only ran windows not Irix (their unix)
- somat 4y ago
  And sgi still could not compete, the basic problem was they were(at the begining) 5 years ahead of everyone else, but were 10 times as expensive, if that was worth it to you you would buy it, however due to the economy of scale there was a lot of money in those terrible "pc's" and not only were they were catching up quick they were a lot more inexpensive. So as a last ditch effort sgi moves to the intel arcitechure chips but now have nothing to differentiate them, still cost too much, and did not make the move to personal music players that saved apple. In hindsight, sgi as an independent computer manufacture could could never have won against the cheap fast hardware from intel vendors, but damn do I miss them, the hardware was always amazingly stylish, performant and cool, and they put a lot of effort into the irix desktop environment. I do have to admit that irix was weird as hell underneath, but I think that is the end result of any commercial operating system, windows, solaris, macos are all very weird underneath as well. I am a bsd guy at heart so that is my gold standard for a logical consistent os, but even linux is straightforward and simple compared to the commercial os's, something about being able to poke around in the innards make for better looking innards. is the best I can come up with.
abudabi123 4y ago
Is there a running total and cost of totally failed projects hosted on the Sun Java/Microsoft Windows stack that rarely gets media scrutiny?
- gumboza 4y ago
  Ironically I actually worked for one. Operations team were windows only. Software team were java only. $12.2m wasted on not delivering an ERP system which was eventually replaced with SAP which cost twice as much and run on some Oracle stuff. SAP got replaced last year with custom software on .Net on AWS by 4 people in only 9 months. On the original project I was the Unix expert and not needed at all so I played Solitaire for 6 months and got paid for it.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Why Java? There are tons of Fortune 500 running .NET and IIS powered websites out there. I know for sure some european airlines are running their ticket systems in such stacks. If you know how to debug ASP.NET applications you will eventually discover them.
awiesenhofer 4y ago
Interesting, what did you use before/after?
- gumboza 4y ago
  Before Solaris on Ultra 30. After Windows 2000 Compaq Workstations. Software demands were EE/EDA stuff like Cadence, Zukon.

mhd 4y ago

This seems more about retrocomputing than a history of the lessons of the death of workstations and their vendors. Which is sad, because I think there's a lot to bring to mind. Although I'd argue that the CDE "collaboration" was mostly vendors giving up hope once they lost to Windows. And hope, as opposed to design skills, is something the OSS sphere has a lot. Interest in old computing stuff stretches from Altairs to Pentium IV gaming rigs. People in a horribly overpaid industry pay good bucks to satisfy their nostalgia.

unixhero 4y ago
Overpaid? Nah... I got all of mine for about 50usd each
lproven 4y ago
[Article author here] > This seems more about retrocomputing than a history of the lessons of the death of workstations and their vendors. Little bit, yes. I highly recommend following the link and reading Holwerda's article which inspired this. HN discussions on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33948573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33948573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33953816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33953816
Roark66 4y ago
It is not just nostalgia. I recently bought a dual core Pentium 2.2Ghz motherboard with a cpu and ram plus a half height desktop case(with an itx PSU) from the same era all including shipping for $15. Out those $15 almost $10 was shipping. Why? Because the motherboard has sata ports and I needed a cheap, low power dvr for my security cameras. I then got a 1tb sata drive for about $12 including shipping(shipping is all within one EU country so it is pretty cheap). What does this have to do with retro computing? Well, if retro enthusiasts didn't exist those parts would most likely go to be recycled already. They all came out from a decade old business PCs and I remember the time when people would pay me to take them away. In some sense it is a result of raspberry pi shortages and resulting exorbitant prices that people are much more likely to use old pc hardware for stuff they would use a raspberry pi before. Before anyone comments on power consumption let me say it is possible to run a lot of pc hardware under clocked and undervolted to reach some really low power consumption levels.

unixhero 4y ago

Well Corrected, True: OpenVMS has an Intel build made public Source: https://vmssoftware.com/about/openvmsx86/ https://vmssoftware.com/about/openvmsx86/ They don't offer hobbyist licenses, which is an absolutely braindead decision. IBM AIX is still developed Linux added support to SGI Octane machines It is not ENTIRELY DEAD edit: This was a wrong statement made by me: "Wrong: HP HPUX has an Intel build in the pipelines", my memory failed me. Corrected above.

lproven 4y ago
> HP HPUX has an Intel build in the pipelines It does? That's news to me. And to the Internet in general AFAICS. [[Citation needed]]
- unixhero 4y ago
  You are correct, see my modified statement in my original comment. VMS, not HP-UX
  - lproven 4y ago
    Oh, I know about that! :-) I wrote about that months ago, when it reached shipping status. https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/10/openvms_92/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/10/openvms_92/ I was a VMS sysadmin in the early 1990s. This was very pleasing news.
- chasil 4y ago
  There was an internal x86 port of HP-UX that was never released. https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/23/hp_project_blackbird_redwood_hp_ux/ https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/23/hp_project_blackbird_...
  - lproven 4y ago
    OK, that's interesting. I wasn't an employee at the Reg back then and I missed that one.

crmd 4y ago

This is painful to read because I'm guilty of it. I left an SGI Onyx, a Sun Ultra 80, a Sun Ultra 1E, and a Sun A1000 JBOD in the basement of a house I was renting in 2003 because I couldn't be bothered to hump the gear up a flight of stairs. I would love to have some of these in my office now, and once in a while hear the Onyx starting up and see that "Welcome to Reality" boot screen. Good times.

b112 4y ago
You should disclose this address, I could be the next tenant, they are likely still there.
gumboza 4y ago
I got the pangs back in 2003 and managed to snag a SPARCserver 1000E with full disk array. After spending 2 days getting it up and then a 3 months using it as a workstation, I got the electricity bill. That ended my interest in running vintage kit...
- systems_glitch 4y ago
  The big stuff definitely can't run full-time if you actually pay for your electricity/care about use levels! A friend acquired a Sun Enterprise...4500? back when they were merely obsolete and not collector stuff, and attempted to run it as his home fileserver (he had several disk shelves). The $400 increase in electric bill put him off that! On the other hand, something like a SPARCstation IPX can run all day for not too much money, and runs the best Sun operating system, SunOS 4.1.4 :P
kelp 4y ago
I had a NeXT Station with monitor and keyboard, Sun SPARCstation 1, 2, and 5. Let them all go for cheap in the mid 00s because I didn’t want them taking up space.
- pm215 4y ago
  There was a period where that kind of kit was usefully usable as (effectively) an X terminal -- you could put Linux on it, and it had a good quality CRT that you would otherwise have to pay a fair amount for. I did that in the late 90s and early 2000s with a SPARCstation 2 starting when I was in university. (I actually submitted a floating-point-emulation patch to the Linux kernel because otherwise the X server had a habit of crashing when it encountered a denormal number...) However, a couple of things made them fall out of that "vintage but still useful" bracket: - they fell off the bottom of the "supported by Linux distros" list, so you were running something that wasn't getting security or bug fix updates any more - LCD monitors got better and cheaper, so running a big 19 or 21 inch trinitron CRT was no longer the best available graphics experience - at least for me personally, my disposable income for buying nice monitors went up ;-) Machines in the "are you running a private museum collection" category are less exciting. My SS2 ended up in in the skip when I had to do a house move, I think.

exabrial 4y ago

That we need them back. The only ‘Unix workstation’ brand available right now in large quantity is Mac. Up until about four years ago was actually wasn’t a bad thing but with glued together parts, declining operating system quality, apple’s war on ports, in general obsession over stupid features with quality becoming a second rate citizen, and alternative is needed and people would actually buy it.

wil421 4y ago
Other *Nix OSes lack polish and just works stuff that comes with MacOS. I tried Kubuntu because of some comments I saw on HN and Reddit. I don’t really care to put a hentai skin on my UI but I think KDE has more polish than others. There were still some slight jankyness with the mouse and trackpad. Still not sure if they’ve solved Hdpi display issues. Windows mouse and trackpad movements are still second to MacOS but it lacks the weirdness I get on Linux.
- ben7799 4y ago
  All these 1990s Unix workstations lacked polish compared to Mac OS too. They were rock solid stable whereas Mac OS 9 was incredibly unstable back in the 1990s. But usability for the user was atrocious on a lot of these machines, and they were often 10x more expensive than a PC or Mac. Linux was already more "polished" than most of these commercial Unix machines by 1996-1997. I used SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, DEC Unix, SCO, and more in one of my first jobs. Back then those Unix machines were all desktops. So was linux for the most part, although it was certainly possible to setup a Linux laptop by then. A lot of the stuff that Linux lags on today compared to Mac OS like graphics acceleration, power management, battery life, external/internal monitor switching, etc.. were kind of irrelevant back then as the machines just sat on a desk and you didn't move them around, there was no wireless, and graphics acceleration was in it's infancy. (You could get accelerators on the Unix machines but they cost 10s of thousands.) But out of the box a bunch of those Unix workstations would have stupidly broken stuff and you'd be spending a bunch of time fixing configuration and installing software before you could feel productive on the machines. Stupid stuff like opening a terminal and the key mappings were not even configured! You'd try to do something and even the backspace key would be broken. IRIX was the most polished in my memory. The last Sun machine I had at work was in 2003-2004. But I was doing a lot on Windows at that point. It was a few more years before places I worked started realizing OSX could do it all. Around 2010 or so I remember being shocked when we dropped support for Solaris for the product I worked on. When we had first started supporting linux (something I had worked on) it was edgy, just a few years laster all the customers had dropped all the commercial unix variants and only wanted linux support.

t312227 4y ago

idk ... * the mass-produced "descendants" of "IBM PC-AT compatible machines" got powerfull enough to replace those workstations which carried a hefty price-tag * proprietary UNIX-OSes where doomed - thanks to FOSS / linux / *BSD * again: thanks to linux / *BSD we could do "serious" work with cheap of-the-shelf hardware ...

sumtechguy 4y ago
Cheap off the shelf is important. I worked at a mac/pc shop in the mid 90s. To kit out a mac dev was easily 25,000. I could do a similar pc dev for about 2500. If I remember correctly sun was in similar ballpark numbers as the mac. I could tell even then once linux/bsd got its act together it would eat the server space as MS was starting to charge eye eyepopping numbers per user for network access on their servers. Cheap is not that big of a deal when you are working on a multi million dollar proj and there are 1-2 devs and maybe 1-2 users. But scale that past 20-30 and the numbers add up fast.
- acdha 4y ago
  > I worked at a mac/pc shop in the mid 90s. To kit out a mac dev was easily 25,000. I could do a similar pc dev for about 2500. Those numbers are off by an order of magnitude unless you lived somewhere with really hefty tariffs. You were probably looking at $2-6K for a PC and $3-8k for Mac depending on what you needed — most of the times when people did price comparisons they forgot to spec out equivalent builds so you'd have, say, a Mac with a CD-ROM, ethernet, high-quality video and audio being compared to a PC with basic sound hardware, no network card, and a lower-res video card. Even a NeXT cube wasn't $25K unless you bought three of them. Sun, SGI, etc. were higher and that was in no small part because they had the enterprise sales model where you had to call a sales person and negotiate a corporate purchase.

michaelhoffman 4y ago

> Please, never ever throw away working kit. Someone will always take it… Unless it's a CRT monitor. No one wants those.

vereis 4y ago
Depending on the model I'd take one!
Zachsa999 4y ago
Is this a ironic? I'm hearing about many retro gamers that love these
- systems_glitch 4y ago
  Seriously, some of them sell $500 USD and up, before shipping, nowadays.
abruzzi 4y ago
I did ditch my 3 SGI Sony Trinitron 21 inch monitors. The were the pinnacle of CRTs in my experience. I do still have a couple O2s, 3 or 4 Octane 2s, and a Fuel in my garage.
- ff317 4y ago
  I don't have it anymore, but for many years I kept an old Nokia CRT that I considered to be the pinnacle of the CRTs I had used. It was probably purchased in the late 1990s, something like (from googling) the Nokia 447xpro model. They used Trinitron screens, but Nokia also added really nice software for the on-screen control/setup stuff. I miss the old Nokia (their early GSM phones too!).
- simonh 4y ago
  Enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNQtQWjX-sA&t=222s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNQtQWjX-sA&t=222s
bityard 4y ago

benreesman 4y ago

At the time when “workstations” were phasing out the key thing was to have a GNU user land. I’ve disagreed with those folks plenty since but that shit was untouchable at the time.

cramjabsyn 4y ago

I learned that decommissioned sun pizzaboxes with huge displays could be had for free, and that they ran linux.

systems_glitch 4y ago

I have strong hopes for stuff like the Talos II workstation and the rise of RISC V, coupled with the decline of consumer desktop PCs, resulting in the return of UNIX workstations.

jjtheblunt 4y ago
Can a Mac Pro be similarly configured?
- systems_glitch 4y ago
  Not sure, but "only ready-to-go UNIX-like" (OS X had not yet been certified as UNIX) was why $previous_job had 27" iMacs at every workstation.

hulitu 4y ago

> What did Unix fans learn from the end of Unix workstations? That greed (the promise of Itanium) can destroy a lot of things. Now CAD runs (or better, it tries to) on Windows and the experience is atrocious. That HP from 2 great architectures (Alpha, PA-Risc) made none, didn't help either.

jeffbee 4y ago
> Now CAD runs ... on Windows and the experience is atrocious. Well, maybe Windows is now atrocious, but at the time Windows was murdering Unix workstations, Windows was greatly superior. When the shop I was working for at the time switched our Pro/ENGINEER hardware from SGI to whitebox PCs running Windows NT it was like a miracle. Everything that was horrible in the day-to-day of using IRIX stopped, and suddenly our workstations were useful for more than just running Pro/E. We could run Excel and whatnot. And a dual Pentium Pro was about fifty bajillion times faster than anything MIPS ever made.
classichasclass 4y ago
What do you mean by "HP made none"? There were absolutely great HP PA-RISC workstations. I have a C8000 here which with dual PA-8900s was a beast by then-contemporary standards, but there were all kinds of HP PA desktops. While HPaq didn't make Alpha workstations themselves, others did (there's a 164LX here, running Tru64).
- hulitu 4y ago
  I meant that HP made from 2 -> zero, none. ALPHA is gone, PA-RISC is gone.

mtillman 4y ago

My first professional computer was an SGI O2. The thing that bothered me at the time was how completely closed the architecture was. It costs hundreds of dollars to buy compilers for example. Linux was an amazing thing in comparison because almost everything I needed to do my job was free. I never took Windows seriously so I’ve not used it. MSFT had far better sales reps at the time though from what I recall.

kanwisher 4y ago
I got my first c++ compiler for windows practically free with a book. I think full version of visual studio was $100 when I was first learning to code in early 90s. There were tons of free ware compilers for dos. Unix was basically impossible for anyone without a corporate job
jeffbee 4y ago
That seems like an inconsistent point. You also had to buy the Windows compiler.
- speed_spread 4y ago
  Windows software had the advantage of popularity, there were always "unlocked" professional tools floating around if you had a modem and knew what number to dial. Unix tools tended to be not only rare and proprietary, but suffered from a lack of l33t hacking scene to remove their pervasive licence files requirements.
justin66 4y ago
> The thing that bothered me at the time was how completely closed the architecture was. It costs hundreds of dollars to buy compilers for example. It cost tens of thousands of dollars to buy an O2.
bcrl 4y ago
That was the way things were back in the 1980s. The only reason I managed to gain any experience programming in C on my Amiga is because one of my uncles bought me a $400 compiler to use (Aztec C). Things became easier in the 1990s as gcc improved and was ported to virtually every architecture on the planet. Richard Stallman was right to focus on a C compiler as a prerequisite to building the rest of the free software ecosystem.

trollerator23 4y ago

Can a Macbook Air be considered a "Unix workstation" ?

jckahn 4y ago
I don’t see why it couldn’t.
fkgmeqnb 4y ago
Of course. Technically speaking, the Macs are the last commercial UNIX workstations.
flyinghamster 4y ago
Absolutely - a very portable one, but modern Macs would absolutely qualify (and blow those classics out of the water in both computing power and low electricity consumption.
thesuitonym 4y ago
The Open Group seems to think so: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3683.htm https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3683.htm
cth 4y ago
Several years ago while at a university for CS, I was doing a senior class where I was doing whatever an assigned professor wanted me to help with. I was given two identical ThinkPads and a mid-2012 MacBook Pro and told to figure out a network partitioning problem involving virtual machines. Since the ThinkPads were running Windows, those were pretty forgettable. But as soon as I opened up the MacBook Pro and turned it on, my first thought was "This is a workstation." At the time my personal laptop was a 11" MacBook Air. Currently I use a 2014 Mac mini and a mid-2012 MBP, which I bought used because of that faithful encounter. I've never been able to elicit that initial reaction I had to the MBP since owning one myself. It's one of those things like how a single bite of someone else's food tastes better than the whole dish you end up ordering for yourself. As an aside, I bought a SPARCstation IPC for $25 from someone on IRC around 2001.

manv1 4y ago

"Unix is a lifestyle. A unix workstation was just an expression of that lifestyle."

manv1 4y ago
I never did get an E450 as a side table. Those things looked really great.

johnklos 4y ago

It's good we're having discussions like these. People tend to oversimplify history, so young people may end up with different ideas about how things were then than how they actually were. It's not only important to bring lessons from the Unix workstation era of computing to the present and to the future, it's also important to realize which lessons we've already learned. Does your video game make incredibly heavy use of your GPU? Who do you think was deeply integrating GPUs in to their OSes and software in the '90s? TCP/IP networking? Where do people think that originated and matured? One lesson most people now don't know much about is the quality of well-built hardware. Most people are aware that there's mainframe hardware, which is just worlds different than what we commonly see, then there's everything else. But in the Unix workstation era, much of the hardware was build with a different set of priorities - cost-cutting really wasn't a thing for most of the hardware, which is why VAXen and Alpha machines are often still running today. (A lot of Sun and some SGI hardware, though, was built like personal computers of the time, and have a higher failure / repair rate.) I wish it was possible to pay more for hardware and get components that are just made measurably better than common hardware. If you've ever seen the traces on a VAXStation or an AlphaServer, you'd know what I mean. We can, sorta - we can buy faster memory and run it slower, we can manually overprovision our SSDs, et cetera, but it's just not part of the market (and x86 servers have a very high failure rate, so I'm not talking about them). I still have my AlphaServer DS25 colocated, running public services, compiling NetBSD pkgsrc packages, et cetera. The hardware is incredibly high quality.

tablespoon 4y ago
> I wish it was possible to pay more for hardware and get components that are just made measurably better than common hardware. I do too, but I just don't see it happening with the market. After a company has established a reputation for quality, it's too tempting for a business leader to cut corners and reap a short-term windfall before their customers figure out they're not getting what they're paying for.
- kjellsbells 4y ago
  I find it mildly interesting that there is no elite tier of hardware available, like the equivalent of a super fancy watch or some fabulously expensive Japanese woodworking tools that you pass on to your children. You'd think that with so much money sloshing around the Valley in the last 20 years, someone would be making super high-end, artisanal hardware.

unxmaal 4y ago

The SGI Users Group is actively working on porting (relatively) current Linux software to IRIX. SGUG-RSE includes over 2700 packages ported from Fedora Core 31 SRPMs. https://github.com/sgidevnet/sgug-rse https://github.com/sgidevnet/sgug-rse for all 3 of you with SGI machines here.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

They learned that you can be pecked to death by ducks. Context: When PCs were starting to reach useful levels of ability, people started saying that PCs were going to replace workstations. In response, someone at SGI published an article titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks", arguing that PCs would never kill the workstation market. Then dual processor PCs started happening, and he published a sequel, literally titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks With Two Bills". And then the ducks pecked SGI to death.

aliqot 4y ago

As the drift away from general purpose computing intensifies, we'll see more of this mainframe/thinclient model, but we call it cloud/mobile now. Only a matter of time before our workstations are back.