[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.