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First cheaper hardware, and later simply better performance. I worked at a small animation studio around 1999-2003 and the sudden price/performance improvement
by dagw 4y ago
First cheaper hardware, and later simply better performance. I worked at a small animation studio around 1999-2003 and the sudden price/performance improvement that Windows on Intel + Nvidia all of a sudden offered was unlike any I've seen since. A Geforce 2 Ultra and dual Pentium IIIs stomped all over our SGI workstation at most workloads, at less than quarter of the price.
Plus since virtually all the animators used Windows at home and where very comfortable with it, the need for support and hand-holding was much less than with Irix.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gumby 4y ago> later simply better performance You probably know this but a reminder: it was a double whammy of scale (network effect): SGI was selling to roughly three markets (video production, high end CAD, and midrange number crunching). NT was selling to anybody, and despite its multi-architecture support, Intel was selling to the same people. This threw off cash both of them could invest in improving their offering. There is a good argument, though I don't know how good, for Apple to do an SGI with the Mac Pro. Its main value would be a "halo" effect: make the argument that Apple is so technically great that the people with the hardest problems turn to them, so you can too. Also Apple helps bring you the stuff you like, movies and music and such. That was an important argument back when Apple was lagging. If this argument still makes sense it might even worth doing so at cost or even a small loss paid for by the marketing department. But the green eyeshade side of Apple's planning hates that kind of excuse for good reason. The Mac Pro has some minor benefits in being a practical way to push the design envelope in ways that will later trickle down, though as this article points out it requires investment in areas not otherwise critical, or even important to the company.
- asdajksah2123 4y agoIt's always strange to hear Windows being actually good in the 90s and early 2000s, but so much of that was the fact that the consumer oriented, DOS based OSes, were so poor. The switch to the NT platform in Windows XP was incredible. Of course, a lot of that was lost in teh beginning with the "Fisher Price" UI, and the massive rise of malware, but by SP2 most of these issues were resolved... Windows XP SP2 was one of the most stable and long lasting consumer OS of probably all time. I wonder if Microsoft could have switched to NT for its consumer OSes earlier, and if so, how much better Windows based computing for most people would have been. Combine that with the Longhorn disaster, and MS lost so many years of precious development time.
- steve1977 4y agoYou could always turn off the Fisher Price UI and switch to Windows Classic style, up to Windows 7 actually.
- pavlov 4y agoWindows NT 4.0 was tight in its time. (Despite the name, NT 4 was really version 2.0 of the NT operating system.) It had the new kernel that could compete with (and even outperform) commercial Unix for workstation use, and also the new GUI from Windows 95 which meant it was both familiar and had an enormous range of apps easily available. Not only was Windows NT 4 enormously better than DOS, but it was also objectively better as a total package than Mac OS 8, the Sun Solaris CDE desktop, and everything else. Open source Linux desktops were still very early. Windows 2000 (a.k.a. NT 5) was still good and a much more practical desktop OS than the first Mac OS X which had absolutely horrendous performance. Somehow Microsoft managed to squander this lead by focusing on consumer Windows XP and their own endless .NET API turf wars that ended up destroying the credibility of the Windows platform.
- GeekyBear 4y ago> Not only was Windows NT 4 enormously better than DOS, but it was also objectively better as a total package than Mac OS 8, the Sun Solaris CDE desktop, and everything else. The issues were that Windows NT needed much more RAM than consumer Windows at a time when RAM was still extremely expensive, and only a subset of the hardware that would work under consumer versions of Windows had drivers for Windows NT. However, NT (and especially Windows 2000) was night and day better than Windows 9x.
- 72deluxe 4y agoThe sad thing is that we remember that era and being used to fast user interfaces and applications even on the ancient hardware. Today's software is so sluggish and slow and all web based even when native toolkits are perfect. Makes me weep.