Maybe discussions happened during development when it wasn't so obvious that they didn't make sense.
A/UX didn’t seem to do that well in the market either.
I was a student so I had relatively rare access to the high end stuff... Most of my time was spent in cheap-ish sun terminals. Later on, as a last year student, I became cooler and got access to the RISC 6000s and started hanging out with the graduate students.
Most of the Serious Work I saw was email. There was some limited running of simulations and research software from other universities, but little that required a lot of processor power on an ongoing basis. I think these were generally more useful due to their native networking capabilities and software availability than their raw CPU power. In a sense, you had to have them because everybody else had one.
The NextStation had a 68040 and it released in 1990. I didn’t say the entire 68k architecture my dude.
[1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.multimedia/c/Vyt0...
In addition to Commodore there were Apple, Acorn, and Atari also making these upscale plays with Unix. Sun and NeXT were native to this market. And non-Unix workstation vendors like Apollo were adding compatibility.
It was a crowded market and Commodore didn't bring anything unique to it. The Amiga's multimedia strengths were practically wasted running X Windows.
AMIX was actually one of the first gcc targets, as mentioned here: https://www.reddit.com/r/amiga/comments/1ikyw0s/the_fsf_free...
It seems it may have had a pivotal role in the history of the FSF. So, clearly, someone found value in it!
Only then folks started reaching out to GNU, as means to avoid paying for UNIX developer licenses from their respective vendors.
Sun even had multiple levels, one of the reasons Ada didn't took off, was that UNIX vendors like Sun had it as an additional SKU, the developer license would only get the classical UNIX stuff, alongside C and C++ compilers.
I was really happy they went and did their own thing, classical UNIX was never great at multimedia.
680x0 was long in the tooth by the early 90's. All Unix vendors (other than NeXT, which eventually gave up on hardware) had moved to RISC.
rhet0rica•7mo ago
(I still have the 2500's accelerator card. The Indy is intact, boots, and sitting dormant in a cozy heated garage on a farm somewhere. There's also this hilarious story about how I tracked down the machine's original owner and naïvely asked him for help with removing the root password. He was amused and actually did so, though not without throwing a fair amount of shade at the university for poor hardware disposal practices...)
gxd•7mo ago
But I visited the lab for the first time in 25 years last week and everything got replaced by cheap PCs... :(
The 90s was perhaps the last gasp of high end, branded PCs. Man, these were some good looking computers. Try keeping your SGI in good shape, perhaps it will find its way to a museum one day.
blackhaz•7mo ago
helpfulContrib•7mo ago
Same as we use it now, to be frank. Unix workstations as an interaction model have persisted so long because it works just great.
I was writing a lot of Unix software in that period - database apps, business logic, and so on. For me, using an MSDOS-based system was a compromise, which I enhanced by using Desqview to get multi-tasking - it allowed multiple MSDOS instances on a single machine, in which I ran terminal software, compilers (our apps were being ported to MSDOS...), and database admin tasks - just like today.
What we have today in the form of MacOS or Linux workstations is pretty much what we had back then, too. The power is inescapable.
pavlov•7mo ago
Every Microsoft developer had a Xenix workstation for things like email, access to network disks, running a decent C compiler, and debugging.
DOS was practically a single-program environment with no memory protection and no networking. Unix offered much better productivity for software developers.
Engineering in general was a field that used Unix workstations heavily. Microsoft didn’t become competitive until Windows NT in 1993.
pjmlp•7mo ago
Linux would never taken off in such alternative realities.
Not that it matters that much now with WSL, and Azure Linux.
zozbot234•7mo ago
pjmlp•7mo ago
rhet0rica•7mo ago
As efficiencies in cutting-edge hardware improved, the gap closed. Intel and AMD leapfrogged the smaller design firms running these companies, and more and more vendors threw in the towel on hardware design, switching over to standard x86 hardware. By the early 2000s, distinctive OSes like Solaris and NEXTSTEP were just legacy GUIs that could be installed on commodity PCs, although many flavors were discontinued outright in favor of Linux, leaving these companies (several of which were swallowed by HP) without any moat or vendor lock-in. (Notably it happened to NEXTSTEP twice, once in 1995 and again a decade later when Mac OS X 10.4 was officially released for Intel CPUs.)