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Comment by kingo55 | Hacker News Reader

Even 10-15 years later, multiple CPUs and 128Mb RAM was quite uncommon.

How much did this beast cost back in the 80s?

Edit: Max configs were up to $250,000 ($663,937.02 today) back then according to this price list: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apollo/Apollo_Price_List_Jul88....

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I'm triggered every time I see things like "$663,937.02 today". I just can't help it. There should be a word for [mindlessly] reporting the results of a calculation to arbitrary precision when only one significant digit of precision is warranted. There probably is such a word in German.

You and me both! When I see something like "a blue whale can be nearly 100 feet (30.48m) long", I want to throw a math book at the author. "Nearly 100 feet" is "nearly 30 meters". "About $250K" is "about $660K today" at best.

Yes, my comment implied "about $700K" since I said one significant digit, but I have no problem at all with "about "$660K" especially when you add "at best" as you did :-). In general I think these inflation estimators are inherently very imprecise across multi decade timespans because the societal changes that occur over long periods of time mean you inevitably are comparing apples to oranges.

Not to mention the number of times you see geographical locations specified to nanometer precision.

https://xkcd.com/2170/

My favourite is "average July temperatures have increased by 2°C (35.6°F)".

My favorite is 98.6F - your whole perspective changes when you realize that it's actually 37C.

Should be 1/4 M$, 2/3 M$.

It's almost like everyone should just adopt the system of units and measurements that makes the most sense and is used by the very, VERY vast majority of the world.

Also true but not relevant here. That original example of overly precise dollar amounts would still be an issue. The root cause isn’t units, but innumeracy.

Sure, that example would still exist, but the example of C to F and Meters to Feet would be gone forever. Add in Miles to Kilometers, pounds to kilograms and all the rest and you've reduced the problem space dramatically.

To provide figures in this manner is to report with "false precision", but we could workshop that phrase into something pithier.

Überpräzisionsberichterstattung

Google Translate accepts it, so I guess it's a word. Only one Google result though (this page).

Google Translate just understands how German allows "on the fly" compound words. E.g. it knows "Überpräzisionsberichterstattunghundhund" is " "Over-precision reporting dog dog" not because it's anymore a word than other nonsense but just because it's what it would mean if you made it up.

Sometimes you just gotta love the German language. We joyfully smash words together to make new words, like a linguistic particle accelerator. :-)

Would be possible but seems overcomplicated. Why not just "Überpräzisierung"? This is actually in use.

Maybe, haven't heard it IRL though. As opposed to the more vague 'Übergründlich'.

That’s when someone takes ages to e.g. clean something up because they are using way more effort than necessary.

As a German, I won't say "doesn't exist" because it's possible of course. At best, people would think it some term from legalese.

The opposite thing though, "really roughly approximately (and couldn't care less how precise)" (you get what I mean) is often colloquially used in German, under the term "Pi times Thumb" (Pi mal Daumen).

So yes you can say "250tsd anno 1988 sind pi mal daumen 600tsd heutzutage".

Another issue is that computer prices are really hard to compare across time, especially for systems targeted at businesses. Do you just use the CPI? Why is that meaningful? Do you use the one for IT? (Then it would be like, "$250,000 in 1989 ($1,400 today)") Something in-between? How do you capture the notion that workstations of this era were basically the first generation that allowed businesses to computer-aid stuff they used to do on paper, bringing a massive productivity boost?

Extremzufallsgenauigkeitsangabe?

Schadenfreude

I really love it when this has clearly happened in US children's books. Things like, "ate nearly 551 pounds of food per day!" or similar.

True, but there were wonderful exceptions. For instance, the Mac SE/30 (1989) could take up to 128 megs, and the Amiga 3000 (1990) was designed to allow for even more (although only 16 megs on the motherboard, but 256 meg Zorro III cards were available in 1993).

Later, some m68k Macs like the Quadra 605 allowed for 128 meg SIMMs, and the PCI Power Macs really took things to a new level. The Power Mac 9500 could take up to 1.5 gigs of memory in 1995.

It's a shame that no computers really distinguish themselves like that any more, aside from high end server systems.

Eh to be fair I think the main reason Zorro III RAM cards didn't appear until way after the first Zorro III machine is that Zorro III wasn't coupled to CPU speed so sticking RAM there wasn't great from a performance perspective - you really needed to use the CPU slot to extend beyond 18MB (remember the 2MB of Chip in addition to the 16MB of Fast) in a useful way

The studio I worked at during that time actually did have a CPU slot based memory extension that can handle I believe up to 256 Mb, this would have been around 92 or 93, but I'm not sure how early it was offered on the market that's just when I started there and it was already in the shop.

I don't recall the name of it though but I remember that it was a peculiar PCB design, with part of it resembling a breadboard. I think the name started with Ex, like Excelsior or Excalibur or something like that.

You didn't mention what machine this was on. Since you mention a breadboard, are you sure it wasn't an addon to an existing CPU card? Perhaps the X-Calibur, that plugged into the Commodore A3640? That's a bit later, though.

> The Power Mac 9500 could take up to 1.5 gigs of memory in 1995.

> It's a shame that no computers really distinguish themselves like that any more, aside from high end server systems.

Well, intel mac pro from 2019 could take up to 1.5TB of ram while I would guess standard back then for PCs was 16-32GB at most. So should be comparable (1.5GB vs 16-32MB of ram in 1995)?

in the bracket that intel mac pro from 2019 competed, 1.5TB capability would be about normal. With some supporting more.

Dual (50% overclocked) Celerons on a BP6 was a relatively common enthusiast setup in the early 2000s. 128M of RAM was also not a huge amount then.

Pentium 2 was released in 1997 and was released with maximum speed of 450 MHZ which could be overclocked much higher.

In 98 I ordered a p3 500mhz with 128mb and planned to upgrade to 384mb. before it even shipped out to me Intel announced the 550mhz irrc or 10% faster. two years later at least 50% faster with the 700mhz and copper mine.

Things moved rapidly back then.

500 was released in February 99. 550 4 months later, 700 five more months later. $700 worth of CPU performance from February 1999 could be had in a low end March 2000 system with $130 CPU. In 2001 500MHz system was already obsolete.

Yeah. My first PC build was in 98: PII 300MHz / 128MB RAM. No way a P3 500 was available at the time.

No Pentium 2 could be overclocked much above ~500MHz due to the way they were all manufactured. 10% is not really much higher.

I vividly remember pushing 233 to 300.

Yes, I remember getting my Tualatin Celeron in 2003 with 256mb RAM. It was a beast compared to my friends machines at the time. :P

Yeah, "Toilets" were the way to go.

I had that as well, and also grabbed a Sempron 3100+ a few years later. Both those chips are in the class of punching way beyond their intended weight.

Tualatin for its over clockable head room. The Sempron for its oddly large L1 cache for the spec.

It was a good time to be buying Intel when they were naming their chips after Oregon cities.

From 1988 to the 2000’s is a LONG time.

The comment I was replying to was talking about "10-15 years later" (i.e. 1998-2003).

Quite a few Unix commands and concepts are exactly the same!

From 1988 you would watch b/w or 4 colours on PC made for offices being really expensive, and from y2k you could play DivX videos and TV at home. And from 2k-2k1, even under Unix at home too (something unthinkable by 1988) with some nice GNU/Linux distro :D.

The technology change from 1988 to 1998 was really huge, much more compared to what you could get since 2010 until today.

You should look up “Commodore Amiga”, it was way more powerful than PC

Although the Amiga was quite a neat piece of kit when it first came out in 1985, I disagree with your comment unfortunately. The custom chipset sorta "froze" the Amiga design to a particular level and it was very hard to make meaningful upgrades, unlike PCs, where you could slap a new CPU into the CPU socket, or a new video accelerator, sound card, etc, into the ISA or PCI busses.

Yes I realize there were accelerator cards for Amigas later on, like the BlizzardPPC, but they weren't an officially supported option by Commodore (most accelerators came out after Commodore was pronounced dead in 1994) and were more like kludges.

I was a Amiga fan until the mid 90's, and you're spot on. The Amiga was too difficult to iterate on. Chip set upgrades like AGA were far too little, too late. (And forget about ECS, which barely added anything a normal user would care about.) By the time AGA was out, 386 systems with SVGA, Soundblaster, etc were cheap and common.

As a collector, this is why I prefer Atari ST family systems over Amigas. Because they are simpler from the jump, they are easier to work on and less finnicky - floppies being a prime example of this... as Commodore liked using aggressive GCR encoding instead of IBM PC standards for formatting diskettes. For everything else, PC based hardware is just more familiar and flexible for me, since that's what I grew up with.

The Amiga was definitely the more exotic platform! I learned a ton from Amiga OS though. It was my first exposure to a "real" operating system with libraries, multitasking, IPC, etc. Once I got a Linux box though, I never looked back.

Very fair! Amiga did bring a good bit to the table, and on paper was certainly better than the ST. I kinda wish the Amiga came with an MMU.

The 486 and later the Pentium killed it.

The PC being effectively an open platform killed it.

(if not Commodore's incompetence. E.g. Apple did manage to hang on)

I bought one in 1998 or 1999 with dual 366s OCd to 700 each; anything over 700 was too unstable for my setup.

I kept that thing running until 2008 or 2009. Great machine.

Dual 450s running at 900 was the price/power sweet spot for a while :)

Tell me more about 450MHz socked 370 PPGA CPU that could be overclocked to 900MHz.

My friends and I all built BP6 machines. Such a wonderful workstation machine. I donated mine to the PC recycler when I moved in 2005. It still is my favorite beige box unix workstation.

I was too late to the party for the BP6...

I was however lucky enough to be able to get a Tyan Tiger MPX alongside a couple of 'Morgan' core Durons... Can't remember if they were 1.0 or 1.2GHZ... But wow that thing was -nice- on Windows 2000 and held up better than most than other systems I built in that era (Although, in retrospect that may have been because most other builds I did suffered from the capacitor plague...)

This does look like an interesting board https://www.tyan.com/Motherboards_S2466_Tiger%20MPX

It was pretty fun.

The -intended- purpose was Dual Athlon MPs.

That said, AFAIK some early AXPs could be used, many later ones could have the bridges 'repaired' to allow dual operation.

Early Morgan core (Model 7) Durons however could also run MP.

One big pain point however, the built in USB was broken on early revs (but hey, they bundled a PCI USB2.0 card to compensate) but also the chipset was... -meh-.

But wow it was a solid board!

The FAA command center had rooms full of them.

And those 10 years were the 90’s, advancement was crazy back then.

So true. A year or two after this machine, you could have bought an AT&T StarServer "E" with 4x i486 CPUs and 2GiB total memory, for dramatically less money.

I assume a 486 was dramatically slower than the Apollo PRISM (which looks reasonably well-designed by today's standards).

It was probably not dramatic if it was slower at all, there is a reason so many of those workstation processors died out in the 90s.

I at first thought a 486 was probably faster, but that Apollo CPU has 64 bit data path apparently. It might have been a beast. I didn't even know Apollo used anything but Motorola 68k CPUs.

I wonder if it might have been a beast at some tasks, but not others?

I imagine these chips might have been optimized for throughput on well-suited and carefully tuned programs, where the compilers could be convinced to put out good code (since it was apparently something like a VLIW).

> I wonder if it might have been a beast at some tasks, but not others?

Domain OS was a multiuser, multitasking OS running on a Motorola 68020 with 4 Megs of RAM with distributed filesystem and diskless clients which did swap over the network. Ah, and with versioning filesystem. And Spice simulations were resonably fast compared to a 386/40 running Pspice on MS-DOS.

Well, with a performance of ~22-25 MIPS, PRISM@18Mhz was about 2.5 times faster than original 25Mhz 486DX and roughly on par with 1992 486DX2 66Mhz.

2 MFLOPS for 33MHz and 4 MFLOPS for 2/66MHz 486.

I used to have an Alpha server from that vintage with I think 512MB of RAM. Came on two daughterboards full of 32K (or maybe 16K) SIMMs.

I had a Alpha 21164PC[1] on an 164SX motherboard with 512MB RAM back around that time. That thing absolutely flied. I installed Debian on it and I remember compiling and running Gnome 1.x from scratch on it. Fun times.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_21164#Alpha_21164PC_(PCA...

Alpha first shipped in 1993:

http://www.cpu-collection.de/?l0=co&l1=DEC&l2=Alpha+AXP

Half a decade later, which was a long time back then.

Comparison: 80286, 1982; 80386, 1985; 80486, 1989.

Yeah, to put it in perspective, in 1988 I was still dreaming about an Amiga 500 or 2000 with less than 1% of that RAM.

We were still a year away from the 486. And that wouldn't become common in the home for another 3-4 years.

Yup! A while back I made a little timeline for putting things like this in perspective. https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/9a1b96ed3109690a2840...

Today a top of the line Epyc Genoa system can have a total of 256 cores and 12 TB of memory, spread out over two sockets. I wonder how that'll look 10-15 years from now.

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