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> UNIX workstations hardware was always miles and miles better[0], although it could no longer compete with the commodity PC hardware due to being exorbitantly

by alxlaz 4y ago

> UNIX workstations hardware was always miles and miles better[0], although it could no longer compete with the commodity PC hardware due to being exorbitantly priced This was true early on, as in, early 90s-ish. But in the second half of the decade the balance shifted significantly and by the late 90s, Unix workstations could no longer compete with the commodity PC hardware due to being slower. I was doing sysadmin grunt work for a studio at the time and beige boxes ran circles around later generation Octane and Onyx machines. They were also a nightmare to maintain by then. The market for peripherals and the like wasn't exactly open and there were all sorts of weird servicing deals. With beige boxes we didn't even need a formal procurement process for peripherals like keyboards and the like, we let people buy their own shit and reimburse them within some limit.

inkyoto 4y ago
> […] The market for peripherals and the like wasn't exactly open and there were all sorts of weird servicing deals. With beige boxes we didn't even need a formal procurement process for peripherals like keyboards and the like Yes, this is true enough as the situation was incomparably better with commodity PC's, with upgrade components and peripherals. But to be fair, any branded PC was exactly the same, e.g. memory sticks they required were not compatible with the affordable or reasonably priced commodity ones (sometimes even across different models from the same PC vendor), expansion cards (even if made by a third party) also had to come from the same vendor etc, and everything that was branded came with an exorbitantly priced component price list. Compaq was notorious (and nearly universally hated) for requiring special SIMM's that could only work in Compaq PC's and only in a specific model. Procurement loathed those. IBM, HP and Dell were just the same. Then, there was RAMBUS trying to corner and lock everyone into their über-expensive memory chips and stuff (which, luckily, faltered and the company went bust). Again, I am talking about the desktop PC's not the servers. The situation only changed after the market got flooded with cheap Taiwanese made PC's that could be easily and cheaply upgraded, so the big brands feeling the market force and pressure had no choice, eventually budged and stopped adding proprietory control pins to their memory sticks and stuff.

by alxlaz 4y ago

inkyoto 4y ago

> […] The market for peripherals and the like wasn't exactly open and there were all sorts of weird servicing deals. With beige boxes we didn't even need a formal procurement process for peripherals like keyboards and the like Yes, this is true enough as the situation was incomparably better with commodity PC's, with upgrade components and peripherals. But to be fair, any branded PC was exactly the same, e.g. memory sticks they required were not compatible with the affordable or reasonably priced commodity ones (sometimes even across different models from the same PC vendor), expansion cards (even if made by a third party) also had to come from the same vendor etc, and everything that was branded came with an exorbitantly priced component price list. Compaq was notorious (and nearly universally hated) for requiring special SIMM's that could only work in Compaq PC's and only in a specific model. Procurement loathed those. IBM, HP and Dell were just the same. Then, there was RAMBUS trying to corner and lock everyone into their über-expensive memory chips and stuff (which, luckily, faltered and the company went bust). Again, I am talking about the desktop PC's not the servers. The situation only changed after the market got flooded with cheap Taiwanese made PC's that could be easily and cheaply upgraded, so the big brands feeling the market force and pressure had no choice, eventually budged and stopped adding proprietory control pins to their memory sticks and stuff.