13 ms·

Back in 1993, a $5k SGI had ~5x as much CPU power as a $10k x86 PC. Not a joke. You could get a 100 MHz R4000PC that would happily drive a display at 1280x1

Back in 1993, a $5k SGI had ~5x as much CPU power as a $10k x86 PC. Not a joke. You could get a 100 MHz R4000PC that would happily drive a display at 1280x1024 for the price of a 33 MHz 486 that would run Windows 3.x at 640x480 They worked very hard to make IRIX a competitive advantage over other UNIX vendors, but it was never a reason to buy SGI over "commodity" If anything, IRIX was a hindrance to adoption, because UNIX was notoriously RAM-hungry, and the early 1990s had a horrible, horrible price crunch on RAM.

nathan_douglas 1y ago
My first computer was a Packard Bell 486-33 with 4MB RAM, purchased in 1993. I can still remember my widowed schoolteacher mother's pursed lips as she paid $1600 - an outrageous sum of money - for it at Walmart. I don't know who was paying $10K for PCs in 1993, but it wasn't anybody I knew.
- LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
  Walmart vs. IBM, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Apricot and the likes. I remember this, because around that time I got my first PC(not my first computer), which was a 25Mhz 486. For 5000.- Deutsche Mark. At that time such systems from IBM, Compaq and so on sold for 15.000.- Deutsche Mark. My system lacked the cache RAMs for the L2, and the tag RAM for these, though I could, and did plug these in afterwards, for actually not that much money(about 80 Deutschmarks). It also had a slow and small PATA disk, on a mediocre mainboard. Just 80MB. The VGA screen I initially got with it was also mediocre at best, as was the ISA VGA in a VESA Local Bus system... For the 15.000 of whicheveruniversalcreditunits at the time, vs. just 5000 of them, you'd gotten a more balanced system from IBM, Compaq, etc., with larger and faster disk(s), more RAM, working L2-cache, maybe even SCSI, better graphics, probably better screen, keyboard & mouse.

13 ms·

Back in 1993, a $5k SGI had ~5x as much CPU power as a $10k x86 PC. Not a joke. You could get a 100 MHz R4000PC that would happily drive a display at 1280x1

by hapless 1y ago

nathan_douglas 1y ago
My first computer was a Packard Bell 486-33 with 4MB RAM, purchased in 1993. I can still remember my widowed schoolteacher mother's pursed lips as she paid $1600 - an outrageous sum of money - for it at Walmart. I don't know who was paying $10K for PCs in 1993, but it wasn't anybody I knew.
- LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
  Walmart vs. IBM, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Apricot and the likes. I remember this, because around that time I got my first PC(not my first computer), which was a 25Mhz 486. For 5000.- Deutsche Mark. At that time such systems from IBM, Compaq and so on sold for 15.000.- Deutsche Mark. My system lacked the cache RAMs for the L2, and the tag RAM for these, though I could, and did plug these in afterwards, for actually not that much money(about 80 Deutschmarks). It also had a slow and small PATA disk, on a mediocre mainboard. Just 80MB. The VGA screen I initially got with it was also mediocre at best, as was the ISA VGA in a VESA Local Bus system... For the 15.000 of whicheveruniversalcreditunits at the time, vs. just 5000 of them, you'd gotten a more balanced system from IBM, Compaq, etc., with larger and faster disk(s), more RAM, working L2-cache, maybe even SCSI, better graphics, probably better screen, keyboard & mouse.