[tyingq]

Brought back some memories for me as well. In corporate IT, unix sysadmins had to know how to manage multiple different hardware architectures and operating systems that all did things different. AIX, Solaris, HPUX, Ultrix, etc, all with different filesystems, raid hw/sw, command paths, and so on.

That picture of the ethernet hornet's nest too. Ugh. At least it wasn't AUI cabling.

[setq]

Indeed. AUI was a killer. We had a policy of turning it into 10base2 right away with an adaptor, then 10baseT when that became a thing.

I liked this era so much I used to skip dive all the kit that was chucked out. Had myself a nice stacked Sun 1000E as a desktop in 1999, until I got the electricity bill. Must have cost as much as a house when it was new.

Then I found HP/UX was horrid. Had a run in with some HP N-class systems with Oracle. Yeuch, and that turned me to open source.

[tyingq]

>>Must have cost as much as a house when it was new.

I do remember some $100k - $300k invoices for larger SMP servers from HP, Sun, and the like. For machines that probably had less overall horsepower than my current cell phone :)

[setq]

Yeah pricing was awful. I remember someone playing £12k for a single PA RISC CPU option and when they cracked it open to have a look it was 95% heatsink. Cue the "bloody expensive heatsink" comments.

It had about as much go as one of those "big slab" xeon slot CPUs at the time which was 1/10th of the cost.

[SSLy]

Well, I've seen appliances over $50k a piece ( you need at least two to be useful.) So systems like that are still here.

[tyingq]

Right, because they aren't currently commodity items. Wouldn't take much, for example, though, to get haproxy to a state where it starts eating F5 lab's lunch. A nicer ui, etc.

It took Linux and commodity servers a while to kill the $100k+/each proprietary unix server market.