Comment by mtillman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtillman | Hacker News Reader

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The Amiga couldn't handle the performance requirements of Doom at the time (Game Engine Black Book Doom). Workbench was more fun than Windows and at least the install process that was early linux.

As much as I loved my O2 (my first professional computer), it was underpowered for the time for anything other than texture manipulation. The closed source nature of that time period and the hardware sales motion meant that you were paying through the teeth for compilers on top of already very expensive hardware. The Cray-linked Origin 200's ran Netscape web server with ease but that's a lot of hardware in a time period when everything went out of date very quickly-donated ours! Irix still looks better than the new Mac OS UIs IMO but no-Motif is a small price to pay for far cheaper access to SDKs IMO. Also, Irix was hilariously insecure due in part to its closed source nature. https://insecure.org/sploits_irix.html

"... hardware sales motion meant that you were paying through the teeth for compilers..."

For Fortran? My memory is hazy but at NASA NAS a bunch of us were using gcc/g++ starting ~1990. g++ was... an adventure. Building my own (fine!) compiler for free(!) got me hooked on OSS to the point that when Linux/FreeBSD launched I jumped in as fast as I could.

I really loved my various SGI boxen. Magical times. I was a NASA "manager" so had the Macintosh "manager" interface box that I solved by keeping it turned off.

We had 6 O200s Cray-linked into three nodes in an CXFS cluster to run an appletalk server backed by clarion arrays. While there were serious limits caused by the single metadata server, XVM and CXFS were better than anything provided by Veritas or the other major UNIX vendors of the day.

The Fibre Channel XIO boards were really needed back then for that application as PCI was still way too slow.

I was sad to know that when I left that job that SGI server was being replaced and the support personal at SGI were going to lose their jobs too.

>Also, Irix was hilariously insecure due in part to its closed source nature.

That was in addition to having three default accounts with well known passwords and a telnet server.

Some versions of IRIX (4.x, maybe?) also defaulted to having X11 authentication disabled. Anyone in the office could "xmelt" your screen... or worse.

Oracle EBS required root X11 authentication be disabled to use the compositor for PDF generation even 10 years later so still pretty common.

Oracle threatened to not support us when I used an unprivileged Xvfb instqance instead.

Still stupid but not that uncommon back then.

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