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Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

> Originally released in 1993, the Onyx from SiliconGraphics was an absolute powerhouse. The machines were powered by between one and four MIPS processors (originally the R4400’s) — ranging from 100 MHz to 250 MHz.

250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz 486 era.

> The RAM on these machines were not industry standard [...] and could handle up to 8 GB of RAM. 16 GB in the rackmount version (yeah, there was a massive rackmount version).

8 gig of RAM at a time when home users didn't even have 1 GB hard drives. 16 GB of RAM at a time when a home user's desktop could read memory at < 100 MB/s.

Having those specs then would be like running a 37 Ghz CPU with 16 TB of RAM now.

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I once (2001) almost bought an Onyx at an auction where the ill-gotten stock (rather, what was left of it) of a con man who had managed to swindle a lot of computer companies out of all sorts of gear was sold. Apparently, this guy had dressed up as an Army general, gone to all sorts of companies in the first dot com boom, and gotten them to deliver all sorts of 'samples' to a fake dropoff point which he then sold on.

It was a massive auction, ranging from pallets full of backup tapes to stuff like this fridge size Onyx (looking at the Onyx wikipedia page, maybe it was actually two Onyx's in a rack, like the image for Onyx 2? Or maybe it actually was an Onyx 2? I didn't know anything about theses things, just that they looked cool, and they were legendary among us first wave Linux adopters, which most 'real Unix' folk at the time still looked down on).

Anyway there was so much stuff to be sold, that the normal auction house didn't have enough storage, so they had to move to an actual (disused) pig sty in the same village. Complete with smell from the remaining functioning animal stables on the rest of the farm (which was still an actual functioning farm).

Most of the stuff sold quite quickly, then when the Onyx went up, nobody wanted to bid. Everybody was sort of looking at each other with shifty eyes, waiting for someone else to make a move. As mentioned I didn't know anything about IRIX or any non-free Unix basically, nor did I have money or a place to put such a machine, but I just shouted out '250 euros!' and the auctioneer looked relieved that at least someone was going to take this thing off his hands. Then some other people started bidding, I got over excited and bid along up to a thousand euros or so and then I came to my senses and gave up. IIRC it eventually went for a few thousand.

That auction hall looked like a 'revenge of the nerds' casting call. Good times.

Their price reflected their capabilities. I think they were something like $20k on the low end. A nice new car in 1993 was maybe $10k. Lots of homes even in good cities sold for $20k.

edit: Wow these were actually $100-250k! Back in 1993 that was an immense amount of money. I bet you could have bought a nice San Francisco row house in the mission or other hot area for $100k back then.

In 1993 I bought a used SGI Personal Iris for 10k.

32mb Ram, 1GB hard drive, 19”monitor. Monitor and system weight 80lbs if I remember correctly.

Alias was an additional 16k.

It sounded like a jet engine.

I loved it.

I wonder where all those machines ended up. Would love to get one and play with them.

> I wonder where all those machines ended up. Would love to get one and play with them.

A lot of them (probably the vast majority) simply got dumped, alas. I personally decided to dump a Challenge (basically an Onyx without the Reality Engine graphics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Onyx). As in: I could have it if I wanted it, I used it for years but it had to go when it was obsoleted. I could have put the rack in my basement, but I'm not young anymore and it wouldn't be that many years before it would be a headache to get it out. So I said: "Sorry. Dump it."

Smaller is more manageable of course - I have a number of O2, O2+, Indy computers and an Octane. And a Fuel.

At work we had a bunch of Origin servers as well. All dumped.

Back to the Onyx - when it came out in 1993 I had some access to one, I worked in the same computer room for weeks at the time on an off. Played with the various graphics demos, mostly. But I watched what the guys were doing with it. It was very impressive, a huge step up from anything else, and the sheer performance and memory bandwidth of the thing was one big reason I argued for getting an SGI Challenge for a later technical project. And I was right on that, as it turned out. Nothing else could do the job at the time (in this price segment, at least).

As for the CPU speed - Like the R4000, the R4400 internal pipeline ran at a higher rate (internal multiplier): https://www.cpushack.com/MIPSCPU.html

I gave one away several years back to a high school art department. The other one is in my garage under two inches of dust.

well you should consider auctioning that, it will fetch lot of eager attention

Including the dust, if it is from the same era!

put that in a non-descript zip bag and include it in the shipping box!

I got a Sun Sparcstation for free off my country's version of craigslist. I also got some other things like old mac machines and such for free like this. This was really out of necessity because I never had any money.

That was 20 years ago, when these machines were "only" 10 years old. Amazing how quickly things developed during the 90s; the Sparcstation 5 started at $3,995 (over $7k in today's money, and the sales price was probably higher still here in Europe), and ten years later you could get it for free!

I ended up giving it all away to a friend; when I was young I had a lot of time and interest to play around with this sort of stuff. These days, not so much.

http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/index.html Contact him if you're interested, nice to talk to!

There is a story from Weta Digital that by they time LOTR was in production they were using their first SGI box (used for Heavenly Creatures) as a doorstop.

omg. i have magazines from this era. what were you using it for ? tell us more!

After high school I got a job as video game artist for Virgin Games (in 92). While there another artist brought in an SGI that he was borrowing from a friend and demo'd it. I fell in love with it.

So a year later, after being rejected from art school, I used my bit of college savings to buy the SGI and Alias.

I used it for a few small video projects and animations, and then started contracting for SGI doing design work for their website. They even gave me an old Indigo to work on.

I kept both machines for about 10 years and then finally gave away them away to a collector.

That's awesome that your passion became your paycheck.

thanks for sharing.

I picked up an Indigo^2 with monitor in 1997 for $250. Had to buy IRIX CDs for $200 in eBay, but it was a nice machine. Gave it to a guy several years later, along with several other classic Unix workstations. Kind of wish I had them now.

I think the house prices were higher. I sold a house in Mountain View (Monta Loma neighborhood) in Jan 1995 for $255k. And that was a bit of a distressed sale as I was the executor for an estate.

What is crazy about those prices is even though they are high, they weren't higher than any other wealthy area of a metropolitan region at that time. Neighborhoods in the greater Cleveland area were getting those prices back then too (e.g. shaker heights, cleveland heights, hudson, plenty more). The only thing is, those same neighborhoods in Cleveland only went up maybe another $200k or so since, and median prices in SF went up by what $1 million or more? Things really flew off the rails for the housing market in certain places just in the last few decades too.

Of course they were, the idea everyone used to be able to buy a house on a minimum wage salary is an internet fantasy. My parents bought a fixer upper in a crappy neighborhood for $90,000 in 1996.

>A nice new car in 1993 was maybe $10k

That's $20K in today's money, so depends on how you define "nice". A nice late model used Honda Civic.

$20K then is $40K now, so that's a bit of an underestimate for home prices, I think. [As it happens, my home was built about then, and the value has stayed in line with inflation figures]

P.S. that Honda Civic had one airbag, crank windows, didn't necessarily have a passenger side mirror, a tachometer, or a wiper on the rear hatch. And A/C was a dealer installed option. Don't ask about side impact protection.

>I bet you could have bought a nice San Francisco row house in the mission or other hot area for $100k back then.

To be honest, the idea of even getting a down payment of 100K for a house like that in SF is insanity. Crazy how prices skyrocketed in 30 years (I'm guessing 2008 didn't help much).

must be nice to have made a 30x return on your house in 30 years

The real winners are the boomer generation. When they graduated college in the mid 60's wages were enormous relative to the cost of property. Property in all the now hotly competitive areas was dirt cheap too. If you bought in SF back then you've probably made 100x or more on the property value.

There's an interesting theory I came across that a lot of the cheap housing of that era was due to the interstate highway system, built partly during WWII. A lot of land that before was too far from cities for people to commute suddenly became in reach of people with decent cars. So that meant there was a whole lot of usable real-estate that hadn't already been built on, and that meant cheap land for about a generation.

If that's true, maybe we're approaching another phase of that, where people move away from cities because they can work remote. And things like Starlink might make some places tolerable to work from that wouldn't be before. On the other hand, even rural property is expensive in a lot of places now. Nowhere is immune to real estate speculation.

> On the other hand, even rural property is expensive in a lot of places now. Nowhere is immune to real estate speculation.

That's it, location is becoming less of a factor to determine housing prices. That said, besides internet you still need good access to things like plumbing and electricity, social aspects, and of course the climate has to be liveable; I can't imagine what it's like since I live in a very moderate climate country (western Europe), but stuff is a lot more extreme in the US, and the actual amount of liveable space is limited.

Access to services is probably the main thing: schools, hospitals, grocery stores. Plumbing and electricity is a pretty low bar since wells and septic fields are a thing, and even electricity can be generated on site these days if it's not available. But most people wouldn't want to live three hours from the nearest grocery store. That rules out some areas that would otherwise be pretty reasonable.

I drove through central British Columbia once on a road trip. There's probably enough reasonably flat land to fit the population of California with room to spare, but it'd be a pretty hard sell to get many people to move there now. Prince George has about 74,000 people but it's the only moderately large city/town for hundreds of miles in any direction.

Lots of California is this way also. People focus on the SF and LA areas but there is so much empty land in thr rest of the state. Much of the hurdle to living there, as previously noted, is access to services. Mainly medical and grocery for me. Having to drove 2-3+ hours to get to a decent medical facility isn't in the cards for us.

The biggest hurdle to living in those places is actually access to jobs. I guess it works if you can WFH, but if you don't have that option, you want a vibrant job market. With jobs comes wealth and then services like retail and medical care.

Prisons work well for these cases: Susanville is fairly rural (1.5 hours away from Reno?), it is the kind of place where if you drive north you get the dreaded "No services for 130 miles" sign. But they have a prison so they have jobs and services that come with the money those jobs bring (although you are still stuck heading to Reno if you need a real hospital or speciality care).

> Property in all the now hotly competitive areas was dirt cheap too.

Yeah, but you're ignoring all the losing bets. How have property prices in Detroit and West Virginia held up? Industry there was booming at the time, who was to know that it would change?

Meanwhile, California and Arizona were practically empty...

Not sure why you are downvoted. Prices in certain places like the rust belt have been frozen in time for the most part, and even recent surges have only sent them up so much. I just decided to take a peek at a wealthy neighborhood in Cleveland for an example of a not so hot market. Here a 5 bedroom mansion on an acre lot goes for $520k. 22 years ago that home sold for $450k (1). I bet when you factor inflation that gain of $70k over 22 years was actually a loss. This is just one example but it goes to show that even recent surges have only done so much to spike prices from what was honestly decades of stagnation in real estate across much of the country.

1. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2758-Claythorne-Rd-Beachw...

In the central valley of California, a house cost $130k in 1993 and today sells for $400k. In those 30 years you probably painted it a few times, changed the roof just recently, changed the kitchen, and so forth. Plus 30 years of property tax. So you're probably in for $200k on that $130k house. And that's not even counting interest on mortgages that most buyers had in 1993.

Doubling your money in 30 years isn't great at all. And this is within about 50 miles of tech jobs, although the drive will take 90 minutes in the morning and 60 minutes at night.

Houses do have utility. Doubling your money in an asset that provided living space for 30 years instead of paying rent is pretty great.

But they don't have so much utility that they should offer such returns on top of depreciation. The market is broken.

It's not the house that appreciates much in value, its the land the house sits on.

I'm aware. But the land mainly has so much value because cities refuse to expand despite the demand.

Expanding horizontally doesn't solve land price values -- prices will still be higher in the dense centre

The solution is to make better use of valuable land by encouraging (or enforcing) high density

Ok yes but even if this was a rental home and the renters basically paid the mortgage.. so you didn't get any utility out of it. 30 years later you made $200k, even if you put basically nothing down. As a return it's a lot percentage wise. Overall though, it's not life changing for most people. It only gets crazy money in the most desirable of areas. And that desire circle is basically described as driving range from the highest paying jobs.

>In the central valley of California, a house cost $130k in 1993 and today sells for $400k

Holy shiz, is California real estate really that cheap?

400K is a very basic house in the outskirts of a city in Austria(Europe), and tech jobs here pay 1/4 of what you can make in California. I feel we're being scammed over here with housing and wages.

If you're willing to basically live in the boonies, yes. But you're not finding housing in or around the cities for less than a million in california. the median house in my area (after a skim on Zillow) is 800k and I'm a good hour north of downtown Los Angeles. Move another 30 minutes north (pretty much in literal desert) and housing is more around these numbers of 400-500k.

But who knows? With WFH being more accepted I can see some less city oriented folk moving out to those areas and gentrifying it. It may be desert, but it still has everything you'd want out of a neighborhood outside of entertainment.

If houses are so expensive vs labor, you could always buy some land and have one built? The central valley city I was talking about is Tracy, CA. Without traffic, it's takes 1 hour driving to get to the tech companies. Monday to Friday at rush hour it would take 2 hours. 90 minutes offpeak at 9am instead of 7am. Virtually zero tech workers are willing to make that drive.

Also, quality of life in Tracy is pretty poor. Property crime is pretty big. Virtually nothing for children to do. Young adults go to the same 5-6 average restaurants and that's it. I'd much prefer to live in a town near a nice city in Austria.

Building houses in Germany (and Austria should be the same) is pretty expensive. Houses here are built to last 100+ years out of mostly stone-based materials with expensive wiring, insulation and heating. Wooden houses with electrical HVAC taking care of cooling and heating is basically non existant here. Most houses don't even have an HVAC system, but just a heating system (i.e. no ventilation, no cooling).

The sturdy way to build immensely drives up costs for material and labor.

The high real estate prices Germany have more to do with the price of land/area, bureaucracy around building and nimbyism rather than material costs and labor.

I wasn't talking about real estate prices. I was literally talking about construction costs. Having just been involved in building a small/medium 3 story + basement house for over 1 million Euros (we already owned the land), I agree about the bureaucracy driving costs (mostly through mandated actions adding high labor costs), but your other points were irrelevant. Construction prices are crazy when compared to the wood construction often found in the US.

Labor is expensive though. It's just that your income in relation to labor cost is relatively low due to high taxes, health insurance, pension fund and so on. Including your employers payments you go home with maybe 40% of what the company pays for your work.

Building even a simple new home will set you back at least 300k.

I guess quit your job for a year and build your own home! Maybe get into the home building business altogether.

>I guess quit your job for a year and build your own home!

Who can build a house in a year by himself? Even with a group of skilled professionals it can take longer. Plus you'll be on zero income for a whole year.

>Maybe get into the home building business altogether.

Easier said than done. In Europe this is a credentialized profession so for insurance purposes not everyone can just roll up their sleeves anymore and just start building houses like it's 1886.

You do not want to live in the central valley - that is why it is so cheap

The central valley isn't really "on the outskirts of the city" in the American sense. It's a lot of farmland.

The central valley isn't where the tech jobs are, unless you're working remote. In actual tech cities a basic house would be a million or more USD.

If you think that's a good deal you should see what $500k buys you in the rust belt:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/14412-Larchmere-Blvd-Shak...

> is California real estate really that cheap?

California is bigger than most European countries... As with them, some remote areas are much cheaper than others. The Central Valley is the most remote and depressed part of the state, used overwhelmingly for farming.

Seems like that's just standard appreciation. You replace the bits that deteriorate and conceptually lose value, so by replacing it, you just bring it up to par with what it would ideally be worth since buying it. Although my father did buy his house in 96 for $80k in Canada, hasn't replaced fuck all, and it's now worth hypothetically $250k just because that's what houses are going for in the neighbourhood

You also get to live in the house which is a pretty good return.

how about 50x return? Home that cost $100,000 CAD is now well past $5,000,000 where I live. If someone hodl'd their property in Vancouver even longer than that they would be seeing 100x return.

Hey, I live there too, I feel ya. Though you have to go pretty far back for that difference. I don't know that you'd have found what is currently a $5m property in Van that was $100k sometime in the last 30 years.

It'd be real swell if the residents of easy van stopped trying to block new ownable properties from being built so they can keep banking off their control over the housing and rental market.

Must be nice to be able to afford a house.

Indeed. Sucks to be one of those devs that just hasn't seen the same luck as a lot of ppl on here :(

It’s not luck ask them who their families are. Laughs in too much knowledge

Unfortunately, that's kind of often the case. If you have access to millions in capital for a home early enough in life where banks will give you the mortage, you're probably coming from intense wealth already, you inherited it, or you were dealt a lucky hand early on by making a lot of cash and not losing the job for the first decade of your adult life.

That's not as true for smaller properties

On the one hand I want to stop complaining about the price of high-end workstations like Apple's stuff, on the other, my employer wouldn't spend $6000 on hardware, let alone >$100K, I'm not that special.

Given the cost of those, did the companies actually own them, or was it more like a lease? And given the cost, would they work on them in shifts to get the most out of them? I can't imagine they would be treated the same as we treat laptops and other work items these days. For one, they'd probably be in a high security section. And I can imagine it'd only be used for the final work that actually needed that power, where most "grunt work" would be done on cheaper machines.

Inflation for USD is almost 100% since 1993.

It seems weird to me you could've bought a house for the price of two cars. Either cars were too expensive, or houses were too cheap.

If only housing had the same kind of price drop

If regulations for building houses were compostable to those for building computers...

Just think you had to ask the most opinionated people in your town every time you want to get a new computer and potentially ask people in your neighborhood when you want to make minor changes to you existing computer...

Microsoft is the new HOA, and Google the new building commission.

Houses got bigger faster than they got cheaper. That's on top of land going up in value.

Yeah that's the problem, you can't just make more land, so there's no incentive to do anything other than make any area you own into an expensive area.

Given that land and the like is a limiting factor, the only way to get it cheaper is to develop the middle of the US (assuming it's about the US anyway), and / or to go upwards.

But that too has limits; megacities like Singapore have built upwards for decades and is still one of the most expensive places to live.

And another factor is that landlords and investors will resist oversupply. This is where China went wrong, billions have been invested in brand new cities that are effectively ghost towns; preparing for an influx of people that never came.

Has that oversupply affected prices at all? I thought they were a bit cheaper than the rest of the world?

singapore has also ~doubled their population over the last ~decade, or at least in that order of magnitude.

if they hadn’t, i’d argue that’d blunt prices.

I loved QBasic

> Having those specs then would be like running a 37 Ghz CPU with 16 TB of RAM now.

More, much more. We've long hit a point of diminishing returns for a lot of standard consumer workflows. More CPU and RAM helps mainly for "specialist" workflows (including software engineering) and can be really nice, but computers have overall been "fast" for a while now.

Back then you could notice an increase in CPU frequency or cache in almost everything you do, even if it was just writing a letter. And more RAM allowed you to do things that were virtually[1] impossible before. Especially because there were no SSDs: You paid dearly for anything that could not be kept ready in your puny RAM.

[1] Pun sort of intended: Virtual memory might technically allow you to do those things anyway, but often the performance cost was so high that it was no fun, if not pointless. But we're also talking of the DOS/Win 3.x/DOS extender days, where virtual memory was technically possible, but definitely not ubiquitous.

A 33MHz 486 was not even "standard consumer gear" in 1993 - it was a costly, business oriented machine that could cost as much as a high-end Mac Pro in 2022 (after controlling for inflation). Standard consumer prices would have gotten you a home-computer class machine like the Atari ST, that was pushing a handful of MHz. Go even cheaper and you would've had to make do with a 8-bit home computer, like the C128 - little more than a glorified desk calculator. There's not even a loose equivalent to that class of machines today, aside from deep embedded stuff that a consumer will never have reason to touch.

Not sure about 1993.. I had one at work (486/33) in 1991. 16MB RAM. It wasn't cheap, but it was cheaper than the personal AT 286 I bought in 1987.. relatively speaking the most expensive computer I've ever bought. So in 1993 the price point.. well, I don't know. Not out of range for consumers though (I found an article in the Los Angeles Times, from 1994, which mentioned a "fully equipped 33 MHz 486" at $1388 in 1993 - their point was that it was only $1000 in 1994). That was just a fraction of what I paid in 1987 for that AT.

I tested Linux on that 486/33 in early 1992, and when my office X terminal broke down I replaced it with that Linux box the same year (I can't remember what the experimental X11 was called - this was before XFree86. Something YFX86 I think.. but no search finds it). As soon as it was possible I replaced the CPU with a 486 DX2-66. Probably early 1993. Still only got 16MB though. Enough for me. Now this 16GB laptop runs out of memory all the time.. oh well.

Yes, and even with that "upper class" PC for business, upgrading CPU and RAM in small steps always gave you a massive gain and new possibilities, and you could keep doing that for a long long time. I'm not sure younger people who essentially grew up with supercomputers in their pocket can really feel what that meant. (No shade meant at all. I, in turn, grew up with many other things taken for granted the same way, before.)

Our 100Mhz Pentium 1 IBM desktop in 1995 was pretty awesome compared to my friends computers (if they even had one) at the time.

Yep. I remember back in the day, getting a few extra KB from config.sys and other configuration files means you can start a game that would refuse to start if otherwise. There were a lot of tricks for that. People nowadays won't believe that. After all it's rare to find software that requires more than 16GB to start.

Upgrading one's PC was also a big thing even into the mid 200X. A lot of magazines devoted entire columns for upgrade and installation guide. Hardware manufacturers lured users by sending extra copy of AAA games bundled with purchasing their hardware.

I must say the 90s was really the golden era for players and developers. Lots of opportunities, developers usually had to learn asm or C or Pascal to do real work. While it is still possible to push AAA titles for a small team. Both ID and Epic were examples.

Nowadays it's just red sea everywhere.

> Yep. I remember back in the day, getting a few extra KB from config.sys and other configuration files means you can start a game that would refuse to start if otherwise.

I remember discovering Quarterdeck QEMM and found it worked so much better than EMM386 for making programs load into Upper, High, or Conventional memory segments.

Oh yeah, and the whole clusterfuck of "extended memory" versus "expanded memory".

Yeah man those were the good/bad days. I had a friend who was a Japanese strategic game fan and he constantly bombarded us with tricks he used to modify the game or the ram to get better attributes for characters. He is also the one who lent me a CD containing a pirated copy of Duke3d which bootstrapped my modern gameplay life.

I think OP meant it more like an elite rig than actually comparing it to a theoretical 37Ghz. At that time most people wouldn't even have a computer at home, never mind one that could actually _run_ stuff. My first pc (a 80286) didn't even have a hdd! I had to load MS DOS from a floppy disk.

> 250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz 486 era.

More precisely, it was the start of the Pentium era. The First Pentiums with 60/66 MHz were released in March 1993. But interesting enough, it seems the R4400 were already 64-bit.

The 250MHz R4400 wasn't released in 1993 though. It (the NEC one) sampled in mid '95 on a 0.35 micron process, and the RISCstation 2250 that it shipped in was announced in December '95. The Pentium Pro was available at 180MHz at about the same time and soon reached 200MHz.

The EV5 reached around 500MHz in '96 though! The high end RISCs really did blow the doors off everything back then. The Pentium Pro was the beginning of the end for them though.

I remember my friend buying one of the first Pentium desktops and plugging in the Carmageddon demo... WOW

Before that I had only used 286, 486 and 586.

My Indigo 2 R4400SC couldn't run 64-bit IRIX. For that I had to swap the motherboard and CPU for an R10000.

And the RAM was insanely expensive.

I remember some senior managers from IBM at the time, who had 128MB powered Workstations using Windows NT. They did not brag about the machines, they simply stated the fact, that this was some engineering master piece.

That much RAM itself posed some problems, because Windows NT was still new, hardly any software ran on it and also that "much" RAM was new, so what to do about it? Virtual Hard Disc? For example, Windows 95 could only address 64 mb without slowing down.

> 250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz 486 era.

To be fair I don't think the 200MHz chips came out until 1995, when you could also get a Pentium Pro in similar speeds.

I miss my W6-LI "Lightning" dual PPro board. Spec built that system with all SCSI internals for $5200 in about '95 (with just a single 180MHz PPro, upgraded later to dual)

> a 37 Ghz CPU with 16 TB of RAM now.

Something common in the hypervisor admin space is expressing the compute capacity by multiplying the core count with the clock speed.

So for example a 64 core EPYC at 2.5GHz is written down in documentation as a 160 GHz processor.

So these Onyx desktops are directly comparable to artists using a high-end Mac Pro or Threadripper workstation.

OTOH, those machines were already quad processors (at the high end). And I don't know if you can feasibly have 16TB of RAM in a single compute node. In that case you'd need a rack-scale multi-node system like the gear the Oxide folks are pushing for "hyperscaler" workloads. (My guess is that such a thing could be made useful to a single user - along the lines of Alan Kay's quote referenced in a sibling comment - but it would likely need to be something that involves chewing through humongous amounts of data, to really make use of that scale. Not sure if the art-creation use case has any real need for that nowadays. Some sort of compute-heavy data analytics for decision support and the like would be a lot closer to the mark.)

You can have NVMe disk arrays that are faster than the main memory speed of even quite recent desktop PCs these days for reasonable money. My laptop can do 7 GB/s from one drive. I've seen demos of 30GB/s by simply using a 4-port PCIe x16 adapter card. There isn't even a need to venture into exotic technologies like NVRAM DIMMs..

If you want to use that metric then the Onyx would be:

4x 250MHz R4400s + 12x 40MHz Intel i860s = 1480 MHz when maxed out.

But clock speed is a very poor metric for comparing older CPUs. The size of these CPUs were much smaller, the number of instructions they could cram into each clock cycle and complexity of those instructions was no doubt far lower, and the variety of instructions and ability to specialise far lower (i'm not even considering the whole RISC and MIPS thing, just the fact that they are working with much smaller dies and far fewer, larger gates)... instructions per second might be a better comparison, but then you still lack that qualitative difference in the variety of instruction as i said.

Another cpu with similar clock of that era was Alpha, whose first real supplies were 150MHz, quickly updated to 200MHz

I just wish they would find a better port to remaster, the current one is a low resolution mess and looks far worse on PS4 than the original on PS1 because it was a bad PC port back in the day and were the only files they could find.

Unfortunately they lost all the files of the original game, so they can only: - Use the PC port - Emulate the PS1 game - Rebuild it (which will take a lot of time and resources)

> Unfortunately they lost all the files of the original game

I'm always flabbergasted when I hear of something like this. Such as NASA losing many videos of the moon landing. How does that happen?!

Could the existing copies of the game out there be reverse engineered?

Dealing with Japanese companies, printing code and faxing it is a thing that happens even in 2022.

I'm never surprised when I hear about old Japanese game files being lost. They probably kept the data stored entirely on some old laptop on a shelf after release and it was considered "done".

> How does that happen?!

to be frank, carelessness.

in the sympathetic sense, this was decades ago, wear and tear happens, and coporate orgs are messy. When Squaresoft merged with Enix, there was inevitably going to have some stuff, important stuff even, lost in the move. Even if they were perfectly careful to keep things archived.

But From their own mouth, it was just a different time where archiving wasn't important: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/square-enix-digital-preserv...

> The concept of games preservation is a relatively recent one, and as Matsuda admits: "It's very hard to find them sometimes, because back in the day you just made them and put them out there and you were done – you didn't think of how you were going to sell them down the road. Sometimes customers ask, 'Why haven't you released that [game] yet?' And the truth of the matter is it's because we don't know where it has gone."

The 80's was just a small wing of developers trying to put out a toy. They weren't thinking of the original Final Fantasy as the Sistene Chapel of gaming. They thought as much about preserving it as I did about preserving that game jam game I made almost a decade ago. If it wasn't as easy for me to preserve it as throwing it on dropbox, I probably woulda lost my source code too.

>Could the existing copies of the game out there be reverse engineered?

It's physically possible. But the effort to extract assets, scene data, and source code and re-configure that into a clean port is much more gargantuan than using the source from "a bad port" and working from there.

Even if they did manage to do that, that's another thing about video game code that's only now starting to be less true; it's an utter mess of spaghetti code. Games weren't made to be maintained for years by a revolving door of developers like a website, and few people will ever see the code. They get something working, and leave it there as long as its not bothering anyone. coding standards were very loose

I'm sure many small intricacies people come to appreciate were merely products of rushed development at the 11th hour, with non-important bugs that just stayed in the final product. Even if they preserved the code, those imperfections fans appreciate would likely be patched out anyways (See: Backwards long jump in Super Mario 64 being removed in subsequent releases).

As someone who was a video game developer in a past life, you are right about spaghetti code. Video games past were move fast, break everything. Hacks on hacks.

And as soon as a game was out the door it was forgotten about. A build system would stay around only as long as it was needed to write any critical patches.

You'd be straight into another game, and you would go buy a whole new set of dev machines for the entire team because the ones you started the last game with are now horribly out of date. The old ones with all the source code on would get sold or given away to staff to reuse at home. And the central backup tape would eventually get lost or reused.

The fact that source code to 90s games like Wipeout sometimes appears out of nowhere is awesome. I think one of the only times you'll see that is if a developer burned off a copy of the source to keep for himself. I know I did that to use for personal projects and future resumes. But those discs are long gone.

It's the same story with things like the lost Doctor Who episodes; people just didn't think this children's show from a few years back that they were never going to air again would ever attract anyone's interest and they needed the space (storing lots of stuff isn't free!) so in the bin it went.

This problem still exists today, too. How do you know what will be interesting to people in 20, 30, or 50 years time? You don't always know that, and storing everything is expensive and time-consuming. In a few decades people will be lamenting lost media that was created today.

In the case of Doctor Who it also didn't help the video tapes from that era were expensive and reusable. Lots of tapes were reused for other productions.

On the other hand, it's simply impossible to preserve everything produced. Who's going to watch all of youtube again from the beginning to search for interesting material?

> How does that happen

Basically all my files from 2011 and older are lost. My files from 2008-2011 were on a laptop which my parents threw away when it was broken, my files from 2003-2008 were on 3 computers which were also thrown away by my parents.

There was no ubiquitous cloud storage back then so most is gone, for basically no real reason.

> How does that happen?!

The guy who knows where it is stored, or who knows what is stored on "that hard drive", leaves the company.

Rebuilding is basically what they did for all the Pixel Remasters. They are remakes on the Unity Engine. I believe the earlier Final Fantasy VI remaster on PC literally wrapped a ROM.

I once worked on a military simulator, and it ran on very similar hardware, it might even have been the onyx. Actually yes I do believe thats it now that I've googled it! I worked on this in 2011-12, and I can tell you compiling stuff was not fast! It was kind of funny thinking that this had once been a "supercomputer"... now it was slower than even old desktops!

>250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz 486 era

March 1994 was both 486 DX4 100MHz and Pentium 100

R4400 wiki: "In mid-1995, a 250 MHz part began sampling."

Pentium 200 came out in June 1996. So ~one year clock wise, probably two-three years for performance (1998 >400MHz Pentium 2).

> 250 MHz in 1993 is insanity, considering that was the 33 MHz 486 era.

I think the 250 MHz ones appeared later on, in subsequent revisions. Still, one of the promises of RISC was that, since the logic was much simpler, you could jack up clock rates further than it was possible with CISC designs.

Much the same promise is made by VLIW today - it should let you "jack up" core counts and clock rates compared to even RISC, because you don't need to do energy-intensive OOO reordering and speculation so it becomes feasible to avoid thermal and power constraints even with otherwise heavy CPU use. (The clearest issue with it is that it leaks way too much of your μarch choices in the programming model, so every ISA is inherently bespoke.)

Or another way to consider it is my 2021 era $399 Jetson Xavier NX dev kit is a better computer in every way an Onyx. Other than my Jetson Nano only having 4 GB of RAM, it's also a more capable computer than an Onyx. Hooray for Moore's law and mass production.

Yes that would have been extremely impressive in the early 2000s, nevermind the mid 90s.

I got my first PC in 1993 - 386 40 MHz, 4 MB RAM, 80 MB HDD :)

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