[foobiekr]

I managed a lab of them. I _hated them_. They were unreliable, slow, and just absolutely miserable because they created endless complaints.

We were rolling out labs of Windows machines. Except for the lack of terminal, they were better on every single axis for the common university lab use cases - mostly netscape/mosaic and applications..

I also managed NeXT slabs and cubes; they were vastly better than the sun boxes because we had installed HDDs in the cubes and extra memory. The only problem with them was the absolutely terrible, shit behavior when users accidentally browsed the AFS root...

The only positive thing I can say about those Sun boxes is that _one_ behavior was better than NeXT. With NeXT, students would pull the power on them after wating four or five minutes of the beachball due to AFS I/O.

[jeffbee]

A younger person who only knows the comparative merits of Windows, macOS, and Linux in this decade probably cannot imagine the relief felt by people when they were finally able to move their technical applications off unix boxes onto Windows NT workstations. The situation was so bad, the computers cost so much and worked so poorly, a Dell with a Pentium Pro was like a miracle, at the time.

[shrubble]

Only some people who were around at that time welcomed Windows NT; others decried the various failings of Microsoft…

[chihuahua]

I don't have any nostalgia for old machines, I understand the 5- or 6-figure price tags were ridiculous, but I'm curious - in what way did Unix machines back then work poorly?

[foobiekr]

Windows on a 80486 vs. those boxes felt very much like if you were to compare the latest M5 Macs to, say, a ppc 604 Mac.

No comparison at all. Just every single interactive aspect of them was worse in every possible way and that includes I/O performance. At the time, in that era, people would babble about how much faster SCSI was, but the disks sitting in PCs were blazing fast in practice despite being attached by glorified joystick ports.

[qingcharles]

For the price, these Sun workstations were slow as hell to me. X was horribly laggy. The UI put me off Unix GUIs for a decade. The mouse was meh.

I love the industrial design of these pizza boxes, though. I didn't mind when I was running them headless as IRC servers or web hosts.

[nineteen999]

They were kind of fast and more fun by the time you got to the Sunblade 1500 running Gnome desktop.

But yeah, complete white elephants at that point. Too little too late.

[wolvoleo]

I always really enjoyed hp-ux with VUE in the early 90s. It was way ahead of windows (especially before 95 was out!) and fast.

Motif was hell to develop for though.

[foobiekr]

There is an irony that Wine is the most stable linux ABI for GUI applications in 2026.

[anthk]

That means nothing when everything it's either RHEL bound, Ubuntu LTS or docker containers among standalone services written in Go which are everywhere.

Serious GUI software will be written in QT5/6 where the jump wasn't as bad as qt4->5. Portability matters and now even more. Software will run in any OS and several times faster than Electron.

[sixothree]

I remember a lab with diskless systems where your disk quota was smaller than the kernel panic dump. So basically if you crashed a machine your account was instantly filled up and basically nothing would work. I believe it affected mail as well. Fun times.