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Comment by miah_ | Hacker News Reader

In ~1997 I bought a Multia off some online auction site pre-Ebay. My local PC supplier had to special order 64MB ECC RAM for me as they didn't carry it. For a teenager at my first IT job it took me a few months to afford the RAM and was a bit before I had it running. I mainly used it beta testing Redhat Rawhide and experimenting with Linux. It was my first non-x86 system.

I did try WindowsNT 4.0 on it for a week, but it was slow and almost nothing was compatible with it.

Later I got some Alphastations but they were almost the same spec as a Multia, just better form factor.

My main PC around this time was a Sun Sparcstation 20 with a ROSS Dual Hypersparc module and 2GB RAM. I remember paying around $2000 for it in 1998, probably too much! Unfortunately the magic smoke escaped from the CPU one morning in 2000 :(

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Holy crap that's a lot of RAM for 1998.

I hit 2GB about 10 years later when I got a Core2Duo workstation.

I think OP is mistaken, 512 MB was max in a sparcstation 20. Unless they were working at LLNL or Brookhaven Labs on something very special affording 2GB of ram in a 1997 desktop workstation would have been nearly impossible to justify financially. And probably wouldn't have been a sun, it would have been a $35,000 SGI. Such as a Onyx or Onyx2, or Challenge. Something r4400 based.

I worked on a project in 1993 for which we bought a SparcStation 20 with 1 GB of RAM, but we used it with 2 X-Terminals to support 3 developers. At the time we thought 1 GB of RAM was crazy! I believe the machine cost us $10K. So, I can imagine 5 years later a SS 20 with 2 GB of RAM would be considered obsolete tech, but I think $1000 would not be a bad price for it. (I see Wikipedia says the SS20 maxed out at 512 MB, but I distinctly remember having 1 GB because it seemed like such an astronomical number at the time, considering my first computer had 16K.)

Yes, my old (but at the time still usable) windows box had 2 GB hard drive and 8 MB RAM in 1997.

I think you're right, 97 is too early for an affordable computer with 2GB. But it wasn't just SGI that had those capabilities, I bought a used HP Visualize J2240 (manufactured circa 1997-8) in the early 2000s (like 2003) and it came to me with 2GB of RAM, with a max of 4GB. This machine was also very expensive when new, in the same range as the $35K SGI you refer to.

Not bad for the SPARC considering it was introduced at around $25,000. Of course, by 1998 it was only as powerful as a dual processor Pentium Pro. I think the RAM maxed out at 512MB though.

I did my thesis (and wrote code on) a sparcstation lx running an (very) early version of openbsd/sparc.

I'd often sit down and write papers at a SPARC IPX in the computer lab because nobody else knew what they were doing. It was a pretty slow computer, but the windows PCs were all on Win 3.1 at the time and that was pretty annoying. You had to boot the PC from scratch each time, while the IPX was ready to go. Anyone else remember Pitt's computing evironment around 1996?

This isn't SPARC, it's Alpha.

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