What did Unix fans learn from the end of Unix workstations?
theregister.com
theregister.com
It's not only important to bring lessons from the Unix workstation era of computing to the present and to the future, it's also important to realize which lessons we've already learned. Does your video game make incredibly heavy use of your GPU? Who do you think was deeply integrating GPUs in to their OSes and software in the '90s? TCP/IP networking? Where do people think that originated and matured?
One lesson most people now don't know much about is the quality of well-built hardware. Most people are aware that there's mainframe hardware, which is just worlds different than what we commonly see, then there's everything else. But in the Unix workstation era, much of the hardware was build with a different set of priorities - cost-cutting really wasn't a thing for most of the hardware, which is why VAXen and Alpha machines are often still running today. (A lot of Sun and some SGI hardware, though, was built like personal computers of the time, and have a higher failure / repair rate.)
I wish it was possible to pay more for hardware and get components that are just made measurably better than common hardware. If you've ever seen the traces on a VAXStation or an AlphaServer, you'd know what I mean. We can, sorta - we can buy faster memory and run it slower, we can manually overprovision our SSDs, et cetera, but it's just not part of the market (and x86 servers have a very high failure rate, so I'm not talking about them).
I still have my AlphaServer DS25 colocated, running public services, compiling NetBSD pkgsrc packages, et cetera. The hardware is incredibly high quality.
I do too, but I just don't see it happening with the market. After a company has established a reputation for quality, it's too tempting for a business leader to cut corners and reap a short-term windfall before their customers figure out they're not getting what they're paying for.
I bet there is, but it's more diamond-encrusted iPhones than ultra-reliable motherboards.
Windows mouse and trackpad movements are still second to MacOS but it lacks the weirdness I get on Linux.
Linux was already more "polished" than most of these commercial Unix machines by 1996-1997. I used SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, DEC Unix, SCO, and more in one of my first jobs.
Back then those Unix machines were all desktops. So was linux for the most part, although it was certainly possible to setup a Linux laptop by then. A lot of the stuff that Linux lags on today compared to Mac OS like graphics acceleration, power management, battery life, external/internal monitor switching, etc.. were kind of irrelevant back then as the machines just sat on a desk and you didn't move them around, there was no wireless, and graphics acceleration was in it's infancy. (You could get accelerators on the Unix machines but they cost 10s of thousands.)
But out of the box a bunch of those Unix workstations would have stupidly broken stuff and you'd be spending a bunch of time fixing configuration and installing software before you could feel productive on the machines. Stupid stuff like opening a terminal and the key mappings were not even configured! You'd try to do something and even the backspace key would be broken.
IRIX was the most polished in my memory. The last Sun machine I had at work was in 2003-2004. But I was doing a lot on Windows at that point. It was a few more years before places I worked started realizing OSX could do it all. Around 2010 or so I remember being shocked when we dropped support for Solaris for the product I worked on. When we had first started supporting linux (something I had worked on) it was edgy, just a few years laster all the customers had dropped all the commercial unix variants and only wanted linux support.
I was too young for Unix workstations. My only experience with them was a graybeard system admin who still had 2 Sparq workstations running something under his desk. Around 2015 they finally replaced the service it was running. I’m pretty sure he took them home to add to his collection.
At CERN back in 2002, most people were transitioning to OS X and Windows 2000 from Solaris pizza boxes, largely leaving GNU/Linux for the server room.
Scientific Linux was their very first supported version, back in 2004.
Nokia Networks only started the transition of HP-UX into GNU/Linux around 2005, and even then, HP-UX was still supported for quite some time until the final switch took place.
I learned that my needs do not always align with the population at large, and I should be aware what is happening but not slavishly follow the common wisdom or marketing. I also learned about open source and free software and realized how costly the commercial software treadmill is, with constant obsolescence. I learned to see the open source world as a living process that I could contribute to and rely upon. I built my career in parallel with the rise of Linux, writing open source software. To this day, I go out of my way to use free and open source tools and treat commercial software like a hazardous material.
I started using Linux in college in the very early days around 1993. I quickly became a full-time Linux user, and have essentially never had a personal nor work computer with Windows nor Mac OS since then. They are both alien platforms to me. I have often had Windows in a VM for the occasional use of some proprietary program, but I feel like a fish out of water when I touch it.
In college, we had many flavors of Unix workstations and shared servers with terminal farms. We also had a local culture of BSD usage by the self-appointed CS hacker/gatekeepers, and they looked down on Linux. But, I found that my home PC with Linux was sufficient for most of my coursework and saved me from crunch times when labs were oversubscribed.
I also brought Linux with me to work. In 1996 I already knew a PC running Linux was a better "workstation" for me than the Unix machines my university habitually purchased. I can still remember a crappy Dell laptop with a Pentium MMX which outperformed a Sun Ultra in my real everyday work with compilers, insane autoconf+makefile build systems, etc. At the same time, I was very aware of the Linux HPC developments going on in the US national labs and anticipated the increase relevance of Linux.
My early job years included maintenance and porting of C based libraries to many Unix HPC platforms. I made sure it also worked on Linux. I tested Linux on my own hardware and also used remote resources in our building or at various US supercomputing centers for the other ports. I have now forgotten some of the OS names, but it included HPC variants from IBM, HP, SGI, Cray, etc. I even got mileage out of Linux on my personal DEC Multia (alpha) to do initial 64-bit porting before re-testing and finalizing on various remote platforms.
I was an early/beta user of so many frontiers of Linux. I learned that the community would rapidly adapt to new requirements as they appeared, and I found this very reliable tooling for my career. I was there for the early 2D graphics acceleration, the switch to SMP, the early 3D acceleration, and various changes to allow large storage, large files, and fast networking. Through work, I was also an early adopter/tester of qemu-kvm virtualization. Previously, VMware was one of the rare proprietary programs I used on Linux.
Not quite all Unix machines were desktops. Tadpole made the SPARCbook line of laptops which ran SunOS/Solaris. In conjunction with IBM they made a PowerPC RS6000 laptop for IBM which ran AIX.
They also made the ALPHAbook 1 laptop which initially shipped with OpenVMS. I'm not sure if it lasted long enough to get the planned port of DEC UNIX. At the time I tried to convince my employer to purchase a ALPHAbook for me, but before that decision was made I left never to touch an OpenVMS system again.
If you're going to credibly bust on Apple, you would do well to keep up. The latest iteration of the MacBook Pro includes a fantastic set of ports.
Then there's the MacBook keyboard. Hello, what happened to PgUp/PgDn/Home/End? I use those a LOT, enough to be a deal-breaker.
And they still have some ridiculous models like the 2 port iMac.
It cost tens of thousands of dollars to buy an O2.
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/507/SGI-320-Visual-Wo...
There was also an SGI sever that was huge, loud, and had crazy power requirements. The price was cheap but power costs were way too much for a mortal to run.
Or maybe I have bad taste, but I don't care, I still liked their purple.
Also the machines only ran windows not Irix (their unix)
So as a last ditch effort sgi moves to the intel arcitechure chips but now have nothing to differentiate them, still cost too much, and did not make the move to personal music players that saved apple.
In hindsight, sgi as an independent computer manufacture could could never have won against the cheap fast hardware from intel vendors, but damn do I miss them, the hardware was always amazingly stylish, performant and cool, and they put a lot of effort into the irix desktop environment.
I do have to admit that irix was weird as hell underneath, but I think that is the end result of any commercial operating system, windows, solaris, macos are all very weird underneath as well. I am a bsd guy at heart so that is my gold standard for a logical consistent os, but even linux is straightforward and simple compared to the commercial os's, something about being able to poke around in the innards make for better looking innards. is the best I can come up with.
On the original project I was the Unix expert and not needed at all so I played Solitaire for 6 months and got paid for it.
I know for sure some european airlines are running their ticket systems in such stacks.
If you know how to debug ASP.NET applications you will eventually discover them.
Software demands were EE/EDA stuff like Cadence, Zukon.
I would love to have some of these in my office now, and once in a while hear the Onyx starting up and see that "Welcome to Reality" boot screen. Good times.
That ended my interest in running vintage kit...
On the other hand, something like a SPARCstation IPX can run all day for not too much money, and runs the best Sun operating system, SunOS 4.1.4 :P
Let them all go for cheap in the mid 00s because I didn’t want them taking up space.
- they fell off the bottom of the "supported by Linux distros" list, so you were running something that wasn't getting security or bug fix updates any more
- LCD monitors got better and cheaper, so running a big 19 or 21 inch trinitron CRT was no longer the best available graphics experience
- at least for me personally, my disposable income for buying nice monitors went up ;-)
Machines in the "are you running a private museum collection" category are less exciting. My SS2 ended up in in the skip when I had to do a house move, I think.
But yeah, it's mostly museum stuff now.
That greed (the promise of Itanium) can destroy a lot of things.
Now CAD runs (or better, it tries to) on Windows and the experience is atrocious.
That HP from 2 great architectures (Alpha, PA-Risc) made none, didn't help either.
Well, maybe Windows is now atrocious, but at the time Windows was murdering Unix workstations, Windows was greatly superior. When the shop I was working for at the time switched our Pro/ENGINEER hardware from SGI to whitebox PCs running Windows NT it was like a miracle. Everything that was horrible in the day-to-day of using IRIX stopped, and suddenly our workstations were useful for more than just running Pro/E. We could run Excel and whatnot. And a dual Pentium Pro was about fifty bajillion times faster than anything MIPS ever made.
While HPaq didn't make Alpha workstations themselves, others did (there's a 164LX here, running Tru64).
Interest in old computing stuff stretches from Altairs to Pentium IV gaming rigs. People in a horribly overpaid industry pay good bucks to satisfy their nostalgia.
> This seems more about retrocomputing than a history of the lessons of the death of workstations and their vendors.
Little bit, yes. I highly recommend following the link and reading Holwerda's article which inspired this.
HN discussions on that:
Why? Because the motherboard has sata ports and I needed a cheap, low power dvr for my security cameras. I then got a 1tb sata drive for about $12 including shipping(shipping is all within one EU country so it is pretty cheap).
What does this have to do with retro computing? Well, if retro enthusiasts didn't exist those parts would most likely go to be recycled already. They all came out from a decade old business PCs and I remember the time when people would pay me to take them away.
In some sense it is a result of raspberry pi shortages and resulting exorbitant prices that people are much more likely to use old pc hardware for stuff they would use a raspberry pi before. Before anyone comments on power consumption let me say it is possible to run a lot of pc hardware under clocked and undervolted to reach some really low power consumption levels.
How much power does it draw?
Yeah, the Core Duo age is probably outside my limit for "retro". At least for now, although this is also at the point where a) you can still run most contemporary stuff outside of high-res video or games without issues, b) accessory and display tech is also mostly in line (flat screens, SATA etc.) and c) few people would use this as vehicles to run old _software_.
A good example would be the legion of people still using older Thinkpads. They rarely do this out of retro-enthusiasm.
I remember with affection the refurbished HP 9000/715-75 that I purchased from my side job developing C software while studying. It ran HP-UX 9.03 (eventually 11) and never ever crashed in six years of daily use. Perhaps this was the best material purchase ever, perhaps followed closely by my beautifully bound, 32-volume copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Back then Hewlett-Packard still stood for top-notch engineering, and I could only laugh at fellow undergraduates with their hacky non-preeemptive Windows boxes with tiny CRTs who had their chassis open and cables hanging out, because something always needed fixing.
Years later, I purchased a HP 9000/715-100XC for spare parts, just in case.
Context: When PCs were starting to reach useful levels of ability, people started saying that PCs were going to replace workstations. In response, someone at SGI published an article titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks", arguing that PCs would never kill the workstation market. Then dual processor PCs started happening, and he published a sequel, literally titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks With Two Bills".
And then the ducks pecked SGI to death.
Corrected, True: OpenVMS has an Intel build made public
Source: https://vmssoftware.com/about/openvmsx86/
They don't offer hobbyist licenses, which is an absolutely braindead decision.
IBM AIX is still developed
Linux added support to SGI Octane machines
It is not ENTIRELY DEAD
edit: This was a wrong statement made by me: "Wrong: HP HPUX has an Intel build in the pipelines", my memory failed me. Corrected above.
It does? That's news to me. And to the Internet in general AFAICS.
[[Citation needed]]
VMS, not HP-UX
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/10/openvms_92/
I was a VMS sysadmin in the early 1990s. This was very pleasing news.
https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/23/hp_project_blackbird_...
A few pages down, there is a Slashdot story: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/11/06/1354237/hps-non...
https://www.argos.co.uk/product/8802877?clickSR=slp:term:app...
I'm not really trying to call you out, I just don't think any of the Open Group certified Unix versions was ever licensed for the consumer market. I would need to see hard evidence to be proven wrong about that.
Certification of the OS: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/certificates/1217p.pdf which is linked on the page you posted.
It's a proper Unix machine. Costs slightly more than a nickel :)
* the mass-produced "descendants" of "IBM PC-AT compatible machines" got powerfull enough to replace those workstations which carried a hefty price-tag
* proprietary UNIX-OSes where doomed - thanks to FOSS / linux / *BSD
* again: thanks to linux / *BSD we could do "serious" work with cheap of-the-shelf hardware ...
Those numbers are off by an order of magnitude unless you lived somewhere with really hefty tariffs. You were probably looking at $2-6K for a PC and $3-8k for Mac depending on what you needed — most of the times when people did price comparisons they forgot to spec out equivalent builds so you'd have, say, a Mac with a CD-ROM, ethernet, high-quality video and audio being compared to a PC with basic sound hardware, no network card, and a lower-res video card. Even a NeXT cube wasn't $25K unless you bought three of them.
Sun, SGI, etc. were higher and that was in no small part because they had the enterprise sales model where you had to call a sales person and negotiate a corporate purchase.
SGUG-RSE includes over 2700 packages ported from Fedora Core 31 SRPMs.
https://github.com/sgidevnet/sgug-rse for all 3 of you with SGI machines here.
Since the ThinkPads were running Windows, those were pretty forgettable. But as soon as I opened up the MacBook Pro and turned it on, my first thought was "This is a workstation."
At the time my personal laptop was a 11" MacBook Air. Currently I use a 2014 Mac mini and a mid-2012 MBP, which I bought used because of that faithful encounter.
I've never been able to elicit that initial reaction I had to the MBP since owning one myself. It's one of those things like how a single bite of someone else's food tastes better than the whole dish you end up ordering for yourself.
As an aside, I bought a SPARCstation IPC for $25 from someone on IRC around 2001.
Unless it's a CRT monitor. No one wants those.
I'm hearing about many retro gamers that love these