3 ms·

shrug And NT was on plenty of high-end devices too. Most e.g. developers and sysadmins ran NT since it came out, over the 95/98/ME line. 95/98/ME were still the

by blagie 3y ago

shrug And NT was on plenty of high-end devices too. Most e.g. developers and sysadmins ran NT since it came out, over the 95/98/ME line. 95/98/ME were still the consumer brands. At the time, there was a split between "desktop" and "workstation" which no longer really exists. High-end consumers also sometimes bought machines from e.g. SGI, Digital, HP, or Sun. That whole class of machine kind of disappeared, and now there's a smooth gradient from a $100 computer to one with 196GB RAM, an array of professional NVidia GPUs, and 128 CPU cores. Workstations had memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking, access controls, proper networking stacks, more sophisticated memory address spaces, were multiuser by design, etc.

zabzonk 3y ago
no, this is all nonsense. really, did any consumer buy an SGI workstation? or a Sun? i mean, i used both at the time, but they were bought for me at ludicrous prices by the companies i worked/consulted for. windows 2k was something you could buy that ran on consumer grade hardware, and was bloody good. it morphed into xp, which is my point about which came first.
- blagie 3y ago
  > no, this is all nonsense. really, did any consumer buy an SGI workstation? or a Sun? Yes. I had plenty of friends who did. Mostly from, very likely, similar companies like the ones you worked / consulted for when they upgraded. It turns out that despite the ludicrous prices new, last-generation workstations sold for a song, or were often just found in trash piles. Corporate workstation markets aren't big into buying used. Supply and demand. At the time, the gap between a modern Wintel and a previous-generation DEC Alpha (for compute) or IRIX (for 3D) was quite large, and not in Intel's favor. X + twm or similar was much more snappy than either NT or XP. And you had the full power of Unix. Also: Multihead. Optical mice. Etc. I had one particular a friend -- a student without more income than you'd expect of a student -- who had a whole roomful of older Suns, and probably a few Vaxes (which everyone hated).

by blagie 3y ago

zabzonk 3y ago

no, this is all nonsense. really, did any consumer buy an SGI workstation? or a Sun? i mean, i used both at the time, but they were bought for me at ludicrous prices by the companies i worked/consulted for. windows 2k was something you could buy that ran on consumer grade hardware, and was bloody good. it morphed into xp, which is my point about which came first.

blagie 3y ago
> no, this is all nonsense. really, did any consumer buy an SGI workstation? or a Sun? Yes. I had plenty of friends who did. Mostly from, very likely, similar companies like the ones you worked / consulted for when they upgraded. It turns out that despite the ludicrous prices new, last-generation workstations sold for a song, or were often just found in trash piles. Corporate workstation markets aren't big into buying used. Supply and demand. At the time, the gap between a modern Wintel and a previous-generation DEC Alpha (for compute) or IRIX (for 3D) was quite large, and not in Intel's favor. X + twm or similar was much more snappy than either NT or XP. And you had the full power of Unix. Also: Multihead. Optical mice. Etc. I had one particular a friend -- a student without more income than you'd expect of a student -- who had a whole roomful of older Suns, and probably a few Vaxes (which everyone hated).