[HN Gopher] The Curious Case of the Unix workstation layout
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The Curious Case of the Unix workstation layout
Author : ingve
Score : 56 points
Date : 2025-07-19 16:15 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thejpster.org.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (thejpster.org.uk)
| pinewurst wrote:
| SGI Indigos (not Indigo^2) were SGI's own GIO32 bus, not VME.
|
| Early Alphastations were assuredly not VME! They were DEC's own
| Turbochannel.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| ...and Turbochannel was originally the bus for the MIPS
| R3000-based Ultrix workstations; the Alpha firmware needed to
| be able to interpret MIPS machine code to speak to TC expansion
| cards.
|
| Somewhere, I have a Turbochannel FDDI card taken from an
| AlphaStation 3000-an obsolete I/O adapter for a forgotten
| network protocol, running on a defunct CPU, with firmware
| written in the native language of an even more defunct CPU.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This is a fun, and I enjoyed the "CRT Dude" video because I
| resonate with that need to understand :-). One of the things I
| learned during that era was that there were a lot of computer
| makers but relatively few factories in China that were making
| things to assemble them. Because it was simpler to take the sheet
| metal work that was already designed and being made for brand 'x'
| and then differentiate on the case molding and electronics, a lot
| of the mechanical components were "re-used" (the factory can make
| 1000 or 10,000 with the tooling and the more they make the easier
| to amortize the tooling costs so the cheaper they can offer
| them).
|
| I suspect when a company spec'd out a new design and then got all
| the tooling done, unless they explicit language in their contract
| about selling stuff made with the same tooling to others, the
| factories could pitch "we will do the basic case with no NRE[1]"
| and that was a bargain. As a result a lot of things ended up
| being "magically" similar in those days.
|
| [1] NRE = Non-Recoverable Engineering which is the cost label for
| the engineering work to build the jigs and tooling that the
| factory will use to make the parts you want. Example an injected
| molded switch cover might cost $10,000 in NRE to make the molds
| that can produce 10 switch covers each and be used up to a 10,000
| times. Then if you make 10,000 switch covers, you have used the
| mold one 1000 times and used up 10% of its lifetime. Cost of the
| plastic plus $1,000 (the 1/10th of the cost of the mold) are the
| real cost of those switch covers.
| whartung wrote:
| Hmm...makes me wonder if a PA-RISC HP 9000 712 is a better
| NeXTStation than a NeXTStation is today, in terms of longevity,
| supportability, performance, etc.
|
| I guess its missing the DSP and fancy printer interface of the
| NS, maybe the overall sound quality.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Unlikely to be better in supportability terms, since we are
| talking about a 30 year old OS on 30 year old hardware that
| wasnt the primary development target.
|
| However, in terms of build quality, I would take the old HP
| 9000s over NeXT cube any day. Those old HPs were engineering
| workstations built by an HP that at the time still cared about
| engineering.
|
| Jobs and the NeXT crew built beautiful things, but at that time
| they didnt have the decades of experience that HP did. (I'd say
| the same about old RS/6000s by the way.)
|
| A trivial example is how when you open up the back, engineering
| workstations did not slice up your hands on stamped metal
| frames and risers. Whereas PCs of the time generally did.
| (Compaq was a notable exception, but you paid a price premium
| for it.)
| linguae wrote:
| Something to keep in mind is available software for NeXT
| computers versus for platforms that NeXTstep got ported to
| (x86, PA-RISC, SPARC). Many later software written for NeXTstep
| and its successor OPENSTEP had "fat binaries," meaning that
| they contained machine code for multiple platforms. However,
| there are noticeable software packages released before NeXT's
| transition away from their own hardware that only have a 68k
| binary. I believe WordPerfect, Lotus Improv, and Adobe
| Illustrator fall in this latter category.
|
| I own a NeXT Cube and three NeXTstations.
| sugarpimpdorsey wrote:
| Old workstations that were purposely designed to run proprietary
| UNIX(r) were also, coincidentally, super-proprietary.
|
| If you could install IRIX on junk commodity hardware no one would
| have a reason to pay SGI $100k for one of theirs.
| theodric wrote:
| But they were really, really good. An Indigo2 Solid Impact
| R4400SC 250 was my main PC from 1998 until I left the US in
| late 2003. Built like a tank. Incredibly smooth in operation.
| Rang rings around my iMac G4, which ended up just sitting on
| top of the SGI's Trinitron running iTunes. I loved that
| machine, and I will go retrieve it in a few months.
|
| Now the Fuel, of the final MIPS generation, was hot garbage.
| Early-2000s PC crap plus SGI does not equal awesome. Fast, but
| flaky, stuttery, and with too many graphical artifacts for the
| price. Maybe the V12 was better than the V10. I don't care to
| find out.
| aoki wrote:
| The early 90s were the era of (1) Pentium (2) PCI (3)
| multiplatform Windows NT. Most vendors switched to
| desktop/deskside designs based on PC bus and PC components, it
| would be more cost competitive (volume economics) and could run
| NT/Alpha, NT/MIPS, NT/PowerPC if the market went that way.
| johnklos wrote:
| It makes sense, if one considers them the evolution of the Apple
| II and the IBM PC.
|
| The IBM had the motherboard on the left, along with the expansion
| cards, and the drives and power supply on the right. The AT
| continued this.
|
| Clones wanted mostly compatible cases, and motherboards wanted to
| be mostly compatible with IBM cases and clone cases.
|
| Then we had Amigas like the Amiga 3000, which had a similar
| layout but a riser to take horizontal expansion cards.
|
| While some more bespoke PCs had vertical risers, most PC cases in
| the early to mid '90s were large. It was the machines we paid a
| bit more for that made being smaller in to something a bit
| premium.
|
| While taking apart my Amiga 3000 is a bit of work, the design is
| absolutely wonderful, and more than once I thought about the
| design of it compared with later machines like the Sun Ultra 5,
| the Motorola StarMax (PowerPC Mac clone) and others.
| drewg123 wrote:
| > _Early Alphastations were VME based machines._
|
| No, they most emphatically were not. The early 3000 series, like
| the MIPS based DECstation and VAX based VAXstation, were based on
| Turbochannel[1], which was DEC's primary bus technology at the
| time. Later Alphas used PCI as their primary bus. There were
| Tubochannel to VME adapters, and PCI to VME adapters, but VME was
| never a primary bus used in alpha.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TURBOchannel
| amelius wrote:
| I think the guy should look into Taiwanese computer history, as I
| suspect some of the missing links may be found there.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I remember it roughly like this:
|
| Before the PC era computers were mostly integrated in the
| keyboard (many 8-bit home computers), the monitor (Apple Lisa) or
| both (Commodore PET).
|
| Then they became more or less flat boxes on the desktop. Early
| PC's were like that (the bulky version) but also early
| workstations like Sun's SPARCstation (the more elegant version).
| They were meant to put a monitor atop.
|
| Over time the boxes got bigger and louder and the monitors got
| bigger which made this design impractical. Some people flipped
| the boxes, put them under their table and the tower was born. Not
| long and professionally made tower cases appeared.
|
| Over time the bulky towers got smaller and we had Midi- and Mini-
| Towers on the PC side and things like the Sun Ultra 24 or the SGI
| O2 on the workstation side. These could be put on the table again
| but this time next to the monitor and not below it.
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