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.
It's interesting that PCs adopted the LPX PSU but not the cases and motherboards. I had always seen LPX described as a bit more proprietary than (baby-)AT designs-- you could fit anyone's mainboard in a generic AT case, but even a HP "LPX" mainboard and riser card might not fit in a Packard Bell case.
Personally I remember AST -- a PC clone vendor who specialized in vertical integration, all in the USA. USA-made accessory cards, fit into USA-made motherboards, fit into USA-made cases, run by USA-made power supplies.
All this dried up and blew away, including the parent company, as both mainland and Taiwan capacity improved and prices fell, but it was not that long ago that you could literally build an entire PC with American components. 25 years, not 50 or 70.
I guess its missing the DSP and fancy printer interface of the NS, maybe the overall sound quality.
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.)
I agree. They are heavy and very strong, and chassis is very stiff. That mattered given where some of these ended up being used and how they were treated, despite the cost.
I own a NeXT Cube and three NeXTstations.
It cost half as much and had considerably more CPU power
There is a reason NeXT decided to become a software company...
If you could install IRIX on junk commodity hardware no one would have a reason to pay SGI $100k for one of theirs.
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.
They worked very hard to make IRIX a competitive advantage over other UNIX vendors, but it was never a reason to buy SGI over "commodity"
If anything, IRIX was a hindrance to adoption, because UNIX was notoriously RAM-hungry, and the early 1990s had a horrible, horrible price crunch on RAM.
It really wasn't until NT 4 that Microsoft started pushing NT Workstation for general office use.
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.
The Ultra 5 (desktop) and Ultra 10 (tower) were a cost cutting exercise that put an UltraSPARC IIi (2i) onto what I think was an ATX form factor motherboard. It used ATA drives, USB keyboard and mouse, a VGA port, etc. This was an act of desperation from Sun, not an example of their best engineering.
That said, compared the performance of a $3500 Ultra 10 with 512 MiB of RAM to $10k+ Sun Ultra 30’s and HP C180’s, each with 128 MiB of RAM. These prices were after applying significant edu discounts. The heftier sheet metal, SCSI drives, and nostalgia did not allow these traditional UNIX workstations to touch the performance of the much cheaper Ultra 10 with 4x the RAM.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Graphic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Star_Horizon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSAI_8080
Thanks for coming to my ted talk
S-100 was very much history by the time the boxes in the article were designed (5-10 years before) VME and Multibus were the first generation workstation busses, PCs had ISA->EISA, Macs had NuBus/NuBus90 - all of them converged on PCI once chips with enough pins were packaged cheaply enough (plastic rather than ceramic - 200+ pins)
It's simply a good design for the time. Motherboards needed a bunch of stuff, none of it very tall, expansion busses were busses, so you can put one slot in the middle for a daughter board with slots fot expansion cards. Drives go on the right hand side by tradition, which makes expansion ports on the left.
Depending on how many slots you want, you can make the case taller or shorter.
It cost as much as an early 1990s UNIX workstation but it featured the technology of the 1980s, so it was extremely slow by the standards of the day.
For the price of a 3000UX, you could buy an SGI with 10x the CPU power, or a Sun with 10x as many pixels on the display. It was a really, really bad deal. As per usual for Commodore, too little, too late.
The Indigo2 family had EISA slots, so it was obliged to hold a full-length ISA card.
There are only so many ways to skin that cat: You want a small, thin desktop with quiet cooling that will also fit a full length ISA card. LPX and Indigo2 look similar because they were solving the same problem.
See also: Octane and Origin 200 vis a vis ATX and WATX. When SGI adopted 64 bit PCI, their desktop-sized systems started to look a bit like ATX, despite a radically different underlying architecture
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The equivalent Sun and HP9000 kit could look quite different because they did not even try to offer EISA as an option
Later Sun and HP9000 kit, with PCI64 slots, started to converge on an ATX "look" for similar reasons to the I2 and LPX
pinewurst•1d ago
Early Alphastations were assuredly not VME! They were DEC's own Turbochannel.
linksnapzz•22h ago
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.
eschaton•15h ago
hapless•12h ago
Indigo R4xxx was a completely different architecture shared with the later SGI Indy
Both had GIO32 slots
Same case, same slots, totally different architectures inside