[hmsp]

These things were so awesome back in the 90s. I got to use quite a few of them and even owned a couple in the early 2000s as they were being thrown away.

It always blew my mind that systems like SGI and SUN existed and yet somehow windows was allegedly cutting edge.

[pipeline_peak]

Linux or Windows NT combined with gpu companies like Nvdia ate into everything that made SGI successful.

As a geek, I miss exotic Unix hardware with their shapes, colors, and RISC chips. As a nerd, who needs that when AMD64 and Nvdia get the job done.

[hmsp]

I once had a magical collection of chips from old Unix workstations - dec alphas and vax, dig and sun. I was responsible for cleaning out a large storage room of computers from the 70s-90s and I pulled all the processors I could because they were amazing objects to look at.

I remember throwing out handfuls of ram chips measured in the KB and thinking how much each handful originally cost.

I was like 19 when I did this and everything got lost to time in the end.

It sure was a fun time as a Unix geek playing with all this old hardware. We had a dec box running netbsd that had an absurd uptime - like 12 years or something. Labs of Sunrays running off of 8 processor mainframes. SGI’s around the edges.

But even then I was slowly replacing this stuff with Linux. There was just no competition and as much as I loved the legacy Unix stuff it wasn’t as nice or as easy to run as open source alternatives.

I’m glad I got to play in that world though.

[pipeline_peak]

> I’m glad I got to play in that world though.

What made it so exciting? Was it just the novelty aspect of having different flavors, architecture, and environments?

[rbanffy]

For me it was the diversity. Even though the machines themselves were similar, some did some things a lot better than the others. Some had ridiculously fast disk IO (the Suns, usually), some had silky smooth mouse movements (the SGIs), and so on. Also, there were the different GUIs - I loved Sun’s OpenWindows - and SGIs could use better font smoothing (but only NeXT was doing that back then).

[fred_is_fred]

I’m not sure it was a much considered cutting edge rather it was considered cost effective. 99.99% of office workers did not need this kind of workstation, windows systems were cheaper and became ubiquitous.

[hmsp]

Oh I agree.

I mainly meant “to the general public” this (windows 98) was cutting edge.

Almost no one even at the time knew what SGI was. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s even apples share was tiny.

It just blew my mind then how horrible the experience of using windows was compared to Unix and that windows won.

I had a job in 2001 running a bunch of computers: 1/3 windows, 1/3 Unix and 1/3 Mac - os9 mostly. The Unix and Mac just worked.

The windows computers broke so often I set them all up to use SMB shares for user file storage. Since they were all the exact same dell systems and all had the same software on them anytime one broke I’d just boot a Linux CD and use “nc” and “dd” to rewrite a functioning disk image to the system in question and bring it right back up to usable. Then it was just a matter of logging in the right SMB shares and the user just thought I’d fixed their computer.

It was a fun time.

[rbanffy]

> Almost no one even at the time knew what SGI was. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s even apples share was tiny.

It wasn’t even very convenient to read e-mails. GUI e—mail programs were not up to the Eudora level on those machines. And heaven forbid you needing a spreadsheet.

[anthk]

By 1999/2001 I think you already had Star office.

And KDE1 for sure. But these were the very last years of the SGI machines.

[rbanffy]

Maybe, but I don’t remember IRIX binaries.

[anthk]

By 2001 it was this, but it was very late for Irix:

https://www.openoffice.org/porting/irix/

[anthk]

Also, I forgot. By 1995 and beyond I'm pretty sure Netscape and such existed for Irix.

https://ftp.jurassic.nl/pub/irix/netscape/

[ventuspilot]

This is funny because in the 90s I was at a similar position. I was at a university department where everybody had a Solaris 2.3 or 2.4 box as well as a PC that would dual boot into OS/2 or a 5MB MSDOS partition. Solaris, OS/2 and MSDOS would all mount the users' homedirectory from the SunOS 4.1.3 box, either via NFS or Samba.

People sadly did most of their work by booting into MSDOS and then loading Windows 3.1 from a shared readonly Sambashare that had Windows, Office and a ton of other programs ready to use. This "immutable" Windows installation worked surprisingly well as Windows no longer could destroy itself by existing and reconfiguring itself, and users could no longer run setup.exe for unneeded programs that would break everything else.

[pjmlp]

They were super expensive, and even if IrisGL was a great achievement, there are many ways to put pixels on the screen.

[throwaway48540]

Windows NT - the OS to run on comparable computers - was cutting edge, and still is in many ways. Don't be fooled by the similarly named products made for 100x less powerful computers.

[IntelMiner]

What computers that ran NT in the 90's were "100x more powerful" than UNIX workstations, exactly?

[Clamchop]

What I think they were saying was that NT and Unix workstations were peers (running on "comparable computers"), and that NT shouldn't be conflated with 9x ("similarly named products"), which had to run well on much more modest ("100x less powerful") hardware than the aforementioned.

[throwaway48540]

Indeed

[anthk]

NT and intel didn't catch up SGI/Mips and Dec/Alpha until the Pentium III, and in the case of the Alpha, even the 800MHZ one was subpar against the Alpha.

[throwaway48540]

NT ran on DEC Alpha.

[anthk]

True; but software wise Linux and BSD curb-stomped anything NT could offer.

[throwaway48540]

And MIPS too.