Subj : Re: 2017/2018 PC to modernize it.
To   : esc
From : tenser
Date : Wed Dec 14 2022 09:02:26

On 12 Dec 2022 at 01:24p, esc pondered and said...
 
 es>  pF> I think if I went retro, I'd get an old SUN box.
 es> 
 es> We used Sun boxes at the government for a bit and I never really
 es> understood why some people are interested. What would an old SUN box do
 es> for you? Serious question?
 es> 
 es> It's like the nextcubes and stuff, they're so expensive, and I don't
 es> even know what they would bring to the table. I would love to better
 es> understand this.

This is all a billion years old, but the software was a
huge differentiator.  I remember the first time I logged
into a Sun workstation, being _amazed_ at how much more
functional it was than my (then) top-of-the-line 486 PC.
It was simply no-contest.  Same with VAXen running VMS.
You could simply do so much more with the machine, and it
was much more polished and mature; PCs felt like amateur
hour by comparison.

NeXTStep was incredible for its time, with an amazing user
interface.  It did not integrate well with machines from
other manufacturers, however, and so they were sort of
like singletons on large networks of Sun, DEC, HP, SGI,
or IBM machines --- many of which had standardized on and
fully supported Sun's RPC layer and services (NIS, NFS).
In that sense, NeXT machines kinda felt like grown-up
Macintoshes, which in some sense, is exactly what they
were.  SGIs were the next up.

Still, like I said, it was a long time ago....  I got a
chance to use a Sun machine at the Living Computer Museum
in Seattle on a side-trip from USENIX ATC for the Unix 50th
anniversary.  It felt like seeing an old friend after a
long time, but where after a while you kinda realize why
you don't hang out that much anymore.

These days, I don't see much point to using retro hardware,
particularly when you can usually get a similar _experience_
in emulation.

But it was a heady time.  Sun machines, in particular, were
built as the machine that the builders wanted to use, and if
you wanted to do serious computer work, science, or engineering
you were using Unix or VMS.  People coveted Suns because that
was so much of the software we were all using was written on
and for.  The switch from the 4.2/4.3BSD-based SunOS 4 to the
SVR4-based Solaris 2 felt like a big step backwards, though.
And by then DEC was in trouble and a lot of the Alpha designers
were heading to greener pastures; Intel got their compiler
people, AMD got their chip folks.  The Pentium was doing by
sheer force of will (and massive capital investment coupled
with volume) what the much smaller, higher-margin RISC vendors
were doing with better technology (that in some cases wasn't
_as_ good: lookin' at you, MIPS soft TLBs).  A PC with a Pentium
was only half as good as a SPARCstation or SGI, but a quarter
of the cost, and the trend line was heading towards favoring the
PC within a decade.  Linux and the BSDs (and BSDi) were starting
to make x86 machines look pretty competitive.  By the time AMD
came out with the Opteron with 64-bit virtual addressing it was
over.  The RISC machines remained better _computers_ overall,
particularly in their IO subsystems, but they couldn't compete.

The pre-Web Internet was an amazing, dynamic place, so I can
see the appeal of wanting to recreate the experience with the
machines from that time.  It's a shame; had RISC and Unix won,
it would be a very different world.

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