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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

The Macs won't old school at the time. They were high-end workstations for anyone who didn't need Unix and wanted a GUI that worked.

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Right. I just mean that macs running pre-Darwin Mac OS seem an odd choice.

They’re an odd choice now. Back then they would have made sense as a UI to the Unix machines.

Not much because a click on a menu would almost halt the entire network by design. Cheaper dumb Unix terminals were a thing where you jut used telnet and X forwarding.

The early web was born on the back of Mac's connecting to SGI machines...

Err, no. SGIs were first very expensive (3D) graphics workstations and later mostly also-rans in some other markets like storage and general-purpose big servers.

Servers were Sun, x86, HP-PA, IBM R6000 RISC (and probably some more UNIX / RISC systems). Workstations were PC, Sun, Apple (mostly for graphics / design), some NeXT.

Er, yes.

Many media companies onboarded to the web in the early 90's using SGI machines.

The Indy was a very popular multi-host system for such things. It was not a graphics powerhouse and in many low-end configurations its primary function was web serving.

(Disclaimer: I helped build the early web using SGI systems, with many major media companies as clients..)

They even had the "WebFORCE" branding with the "to author and serve" tagline! I also did a lot of early web work on an Indy, and we hosted on a Challenge!

I have a Challenge S right now, and when I got it the drive had web hosting setup for a car dealer.

There's a good series of articles on WebForce by the person at SGI who had the idea.

Starts here:

https://therealmccrea.com/2014/01/09/january-1994-a-very-goo...

That was a delightful read - in those days I'd already been involved in starting a major ISP, and .. burned out from that .. dove straight into the web, founding one of SoCals' first web development agencies, in that same time period - late '94 - early '95. We had brand new Indy's delivered, a contract with Prime Time Sports network and a few other Hollywood players, and .. it rocked .. until it didn't.

So it was really interesting to read the stories from the SGI side of things, straight from the source. We pushed those machines into places they didn't really belong (US Huntington Beach Womens Volleyball tournaments .. so much sand ..) and did things we shouldn't really be doing (Hi, Aleph One!), but .. so much fun.

I'll boot up my Octane2 for the memories this weekend, maybe I can still find some of the old sites we made with that clunky WebFORCE software ..

I also enjoyed that read, as a fellow SGI user.

OK, I see that an Indy went for about the same price as a SPARCstation 5 in 1993. I knew about the low-cost Indy, but not that it was that low cost (for a UNIX workstation, about $5000).

Maybe you also didn't know that it was marketed as a web server and in that capacity, was quite a bit more widely deployed than you might expect for such a machine ..

I easily spent $5000 on PC hardware in that era, just sayin’…

You could pay that much I guess, which would get you a Pentium in 1993.

That's a waste for an SGI machine. SGI's were mainly known for 3D stuff.

The Indy was a very popular platform for building an early web presence. I know, because I used it for multiple, major media companies who were getting onto the train.

Maybe; but compared to a Sun machine the Indy had better graphical capabilities. And far beyond from a PC and an Amiga.

You could always repurpose the SGI machine for anything else too.

The Indy had poor graphics capabilities, compared to the other desktop machines SGI was making at the time - I was excited to see what might have happened if SGI had kept going in this direction, and made a laptop.

Instead they did a deal with the devil and died.

I got a tiBook to use as a terminal for my SGI boxes at the time, and well now, 20 years later, a table full of Apple gear and the Octane2’s in storage, probably to be dusted off by a descendent some day .. it is sort of extraordinary that Apple ate SGI’s lunch in the Unix workstation department.

“Just used Telnet” and “cheaper dumb Unix terminals” .. hmm .. not to be bold or anything, but I’ve been using Unix since the folding paper terminal days .. and as I remember it personally, it kinda went like this: paper-terminal connected to modem (telephone suction cup model) .. hazeltine serial terminal and either 2 long RS232 cables strung to the ops room if you were local, or a HAYES modem or two .. but still only a tty, no addressable graphics - these kinds of ‘cheap’ terminal accessories were kind of the thing for most of the early 80’s, then around mid to late 80’s, PC’s got Ethernet, C:\TERM\TERM.COM, etc..

Those ‘cheaper dump Unix terminals’ with Ethernet you might be remembering were not so dumb, but rather smart - i.e. had Ethernet and addressable graphics, and an onboard X server .. i.e. dumb X terminals.

When Mac got X, or at least Ethernet (and thus sockets), it was a pretty comfortable way to term to the Unix box, since the Mac wasn’t dumb, and could do plenty and plenty of other things ..

You can forward X windows over slip/plip or ppp running on rs232.

TCP/IPover serial lines is a thing!

True, but you need more than a ‘dumb terminal’ to do that.. you need an actual networking stack, ppp/slip driver, etc.

More than high end, low-mid end for journalists, book writing and editing people, graphic designers, magazine producers and whatnot. Really high end machines were the Sun and SGI ones.

true. the book was written before Windows was released.

The book came out in 1990, the same year Windows 3.0 was released. Windows 1.0 was released in 1985 and 2.0 was released in 1987.

Almost noone used Windows until Windows 3.1. Not even engineering colleges. For intents and purposes, Windows does not really exist til 3.1 for most people. And that didn't even have a TCP/IP stack native; you had to install WinSock.

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