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> I searched around for a cool system and settled on DECstation2100 (or its big brother - DECstation3100). The DECstation 3100 was nice. It was very fast at t
by neilv 3y ago
> I searched around for a cool system and settled on DECstation2100 (or its big brother - DECstation3100).
The DECstation 3100 was nice. It was very fast at the time it came out, and had the huge CRT with the GUI desktop, mouse, etc., a few years after the Mac. It also my first time seeing a Unix workstation, which was fantastic at the time, since I'd only ever touched Unix on BBSes and on random old underpowered timesharing boxes with old dumb terminals. (It was an internship, I was in charge of the porting lab for some very expensive software, and our first DECstation 3100, hostname `screamer`, was probably our fastest at that moment, so it doubled as my first workstation.)
Ultrix was a decent Unix, and DECwindows was nicer than the stock X11 found on many other Unix workstations. Not as consumer-products polished and friendly as the Mac, but obviously a more powerful OS, and more flexible distributed window system.
Another nice thing about Ultrix was that it could talk both TCP/IP and DECnet. I used this to rig up transparent access to our VAXstation 3100 VAX/VMS units remotely from people's Sun workstations in their cubes. (And without trying to get purchase authorization for something like Multinet for the VAXstations.)
(This gateway later evolved into a small part of the Common User Environment (CUE) that I developed as an over-enthusiastic intern's evenings&weekends project, which gave familiar and powerful UI, features, and accesses, no matter which workstation or porting system you were in front of. Which was before the Unix workstation vendors got together to make CDE, but got their lunch eaten by Windows NT on the engineering desktop, and eventually by Linux on the dotcom servers. And you tied an onion on your belt, which was the fashion of the day.)
This article of course demonstrates much more intimate familiarity with the DECstation 3100 than I ever needed to have, and is very impressive.
- lizknope 3y agoI had used AIX and SunOS in high school but when I started college in 1993 our university had hundreds of DECstation 2100 and 3100 machines. There were a few DECstation 5000 machines that were faster. I thought they were great machines but over the next few years almost all of them were replaced with Sun SPARC or HP PA-RISC machines that had more software available for them.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoI love that era of Unix workstation computing. As a teen I'd buy copies of UnixWorld at the bookstore mainly just to gawk at the screenshots and photos of the workstations. Looking back, isn't it kind of crazy that a) such a magazine existed b) it was on the magazine rack at random bookstores in the middle of nowhere? And when I finally got a 486/50 that could run Linux, I spent hours tweaking my desktop env to try to make it more workstation-y (OpenLook or Motif-ish), purely on aesthetic grounds not for practical purposes :-)
- dekhn 3y agoI was a big fan of the Alpha workstation I had access to at UCSC's CS department in ~94. it was 64-bit and faster than anything else around. Didn't think much of CDE, as I was running FVWM at home and that did what I wanted.
- neilv 3y agoThe Unix workstation vendors seemed to often leapfrog each other. For example (not complete): DECstation 3100 -> various later SPARCs -> RS/6000 -> HP 9000/7xx -> more SPARCs -> DEC Alpha Yeah, I kept going back to Fwvm for a long time, after trying various things. The only thing that replace it long-term was Xmonad. (I tried i3wm, but went back to Xmonad, which seems a bit more opinionated in a good way for how I want to manage mostly transient windows on laptop.)