It's worth looking at this from multiple angles, though.
Intuitively, I'm also extremely said that "workstations" aren't a thing anymore. That there are no professional, well-engineered, powerful Sun or SGI workstations anymore. In a sense, they even felt similar to sports cars: You drooled for them, often from a distance.
On the flip side, I don't miss exactly that: Not being able to afford such a thing, or even if you theoretically could, having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars (not even accounting for inflation yet).
Extremely powerful PCs are now available to nearly everyone who wants one, especially if you take into account that even a 10+ year old dumpster PC does more than almost all these past workstations in several regards.
We'd probably be lamenting the opposite if that wasn't the case. But yes, the shine and magic is mostly gone...
The end was hard for the workstation people. In the late 1990s, I went to visit a visual effects house in Hollywood. They used almost all SGI machines, with a few Windows NT machines. Two or three years later, the ratio had totally reversed.
I visited people at SGI's animation unit, which was in what's now the Computer Museum. They were trying to sell a Windows NT machine with their GPU for about $12,000. It didn't work out.
I once saw a Softimage demo at SIGGRAPH where they had a PC hooked up to a full rack of compute servers for rendering, allowing them to run the good renderer at full frame rate. All x86/NT, not Unix. Someone commented "That's Steven Speilberg's PC."
There are no AI workstations or rendering workstations, because that's now done "in the cloud". People don't buy 128 processor ARM machines and run Linux on the desktop much.
Although a game developer's machine today, with maybe 128GB RAM and an NVidia 5080, is a pretty good supercomputer.
It doesn't take much to get the price up to low 5-figure USD (inflation UN-adjusted similar to lower end SUN workstation prices)...Max CPU and max RAM already bring you to $10k without a monitor.
I have a few of these and enjoy them — the PDP-8 (emulated: PiDP-8), Altair 8800 (emulated: Altair-Duino), KIM-1 (more or less the real deal modulo the 6530 RIOT chips that are no longer available: PAL-1 and PAL-2).
These, as kits, are fun to assemble, fun then to play around with.
The ZX80 is another old computer that can be made very close to the original ( there are no special chips inside, and most of them are still being manufactured. The DIP version of the Z80 CPU is famously no longer being manufactured since last year and the RAM chips probably aren't either, but there's no shortage of new old stock for both).
My interest lies in the VAX 11/780 running VMS. I once had one running in my janky old smartphone via Termux/SimH, but I lost it when I upgraded Termux, not realizing that it would delete all my stuff in the process. (Android is weird about files)
Some early machines were programmed by directly entering binary code. A number of switches to set location in RAM, more switches to set value that goes there, then push button / toggle a switch to write.
Same for machine functions: enable/disable certain features, write-protect some RAM areas, etc. Think old PC's turbo button, multiplied.
The PDP-8 was hardware replicated many times. In the '80s it was a common final year project. There's a classic textbook that works through designing and implementing a clone of the PDP-8/I [1]. I've run into a number of threads over the years where hobbyists have done it with TTL to varying degrees of completeness.
The Apollo Guidance Computer was recreated by a hobbyist from the original designs using a modern logic family but gate-equivalent -- and I can't find it online anymore! Anyone know?
You can still build an original Apple II. [2] Being from the late 1970s there was no custom logic; it's straight TTL plus a 6502, and all the chips are still in production except for the ROMs and DRAM, which are easy enough to work around or find used.
Art of Digital Design: An Introduction to Top-Down Design - Prosser & Winkel, I took their graduate class in 1990 at IU Bloomington.
In this class I & my lab partner designed and built a PDP-8 out of PALs on a wire wrapped board. And we loaded code from old paper tape sources as part of the testing. It was a fun class :)
replica / new hardware that looks the same, with lights and buttons. Behind the panel is (from the one I looked at) an Arduino running an emulator. Don't know if the blinking lights respond the same or if the hardware switches, ports, etc work.
The "Extinct" arrow next to "Workstations - Sun, SGI" is sad - I miss the days of workstation-class machines
It's worth looking at this from multiple angles, though.
Intuitively, I'm also extremely said that "workstations" aren't a thing anymore. That there are no professional, well-engineered, powerful Sun or SGI workstations anymore. In a sense, they even felt similar to sports cars: You drooled for them, often from a distance.
On the flip side, I don't miss exactly that: Not being able to afford such a thing, or even if you theoretically could, having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars (not even accounting for inflation yet).
Extremely powerful PCs are now available to nearly everyone who wants one, especially if you take into account that even a 10+ year old dumpster PC does more than almost all these past workstations in several regards.
We'd probably be lamenting the opposite if that wasn't the case. But yes, the shine and magic is mostly gone...
The end was hard for the workstation people. In the late 1990s, I went to visit a visual effects house in Hollywood. They used almost all SGI machines, with a few Windows NT machines. Two or three years later, the ratio had totally reversed.
I visited people at SGI's animation unit, which was in what's now the Computer Museum. They were trying to sell a Windows NT machine with their GPU for about $12,000. It didn't work out.
I once saw a Softimage demo at SIGGRAPH where they had a PC hooked up to a full rack of compute servers for rendering, allowing them to run the good renderer at full frame rate. All x86/NT, not Unix. Someone commented "That's Steven Speilberg's PC."
There are no AI workstations or rendering workstations, because that's now done "in the cloud". People don't buy 128 processor ARM machines and run Linux on the desktop much.
Although a game developer's machine today, with maybe 128GB RAM and an NVidia 5080, is a pretty good supercomputer.
Workstation-class machines are very much available, at workstation-class prices.
You can buy a 64-core 7985WX Threadripper Pro with Nvidia RTX6000 and 256GB RAM for $30k or so.
Upgrade to an A100 if you're in a hurry.
They're not unusual in commercial video and animation, machine learning, and general science/engineering.
TBH you could reasonably class the $4k M3Ultra Mac Studio as a low-end workstation-grade machine for some tasks.
This might not be the most rational thing to say but I think "workstation" means "Unix workstation" which means "non-x86".
The aforementioned mac is Unix on RISC!
I don’t mean to be a downer, but it is XNU (X is not Unix) on RISC.
“or as I like to call it, XNU/RISC”
It isn't Unix. It is UNIX.
https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3710.htm
Apologies, I should have said "XNU stands for X is Not UNIX." Someone should update the docs at Apple! [0]
[0] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Po...
That is true :) So Apple has become the last remaining Unix workstation vendor?
It doesn't take much to get the price up to low 5-figure USD (inflation UN-adjusted similar to lower end SUN workstation prices)...Max CPU and max RAM already bring you to $10k without a monitor.
and those color graded monitors are expensive!
I have a few of these and enjoy them — the PDP-8 (emulated: PiDP-8), Altair 8800 (emulated: Altair-Duino), KIM-1 (more or less the real deal modulo the 6530 RIOT chips that are no longer available: PAL-1 and PAL-2).
These, as kits, are fun to assemble, fun then to play around with.
The ZX80 is another old computer that can be made very close to the original ( there are no special chips inside, and most of them are still being manufactured. The DIP version of the Z80 CPU is famously no longer being manufactured since last year and the RAM chips probably aren't either, but there's no shortage of new old stock for both).
If you want to make your own: http://searle.x10host.com/zx80/zx80.html
My build log (including Gerbers based on Searle's foils): https://blog.qiqitori.com/2024/03/building-a-new-zx80/
Old mini-computers, one of my favourite topics! Obligatory plug for doing achieving something similar today on a budget https://rodyne.com/?p=1751 discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42672366
My interest lies in the VAX 11/780 running VMS. I once had one running in my janky old smartphone via Termux/SimH, but I lost it when I upgraded Termux, not realizing that it would delete all my stuff in the process. (Android is weird about files)
I may be alone in craving an AN/UYK-7.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/UYK-7
Obsolescence Guaranteed Is a good name for a replica retro computer store.
If I ever retire and run a bar on the beach^w^w^w^w retro computer store, that’s what it’ll be called.
Why do classic computers looks so much like synths ?
Some early machines were programmed by directly entering binary code. A number of switches to set location in RAM, more switches to set value that goes there, then push button / toggle a switch to write.
Same for machine functions: enable/disable certain features, write-protect some RAM areas, etc. Think old PC's turbo button, multiplied.
I was just thinking how looking at these scratches the same itch that looking at synths does.
Thank you dbelson for the mention! It's the oxygen we need.
...but just now, our web server crashed on the Hacker News traffic. Of course...
by "replica" you mean emulator or something else?
They do appear to mean emulator.
The PDP-8 was hardware replicated many times. In the '80s it was a common final year project. There's a classic textbook that works through designing and implementing a clone of the PDP-8/I [1]. I've run into a number of threads over the years where hobbyists have done it with TTL to varying degrees of completeness.
The Apollo Guidance Computer was recreated by a hobbyist from the original designs using a modern logic family but gate-equivalent -- and I can't find it online anymore! Anyone know?
You can still build an original Apple II. [2] Being from the late 1970s there was no custom logic; it's straight TTL plus a 6502, and all the chips are still in production except for the ROMs and DRAM, which are easy enough to work around or find used.
[1] https://www.amazon.ca/Art-Digital-Design-Introduction-Top-Do...
[2] https://www.reactivemicro.com/product/apple-ii-plus-rev-7-rf...
Art of Digital Design: An Introduction to Top-Down Design - Prosser & Winkel, I took their graduate class in 1990 at IU Bloomington.
In this class I & my lab partner designed and built a PDP-8 out of PALs on a wire wrapped board. And we loaded code from old paper tape sources as part of the testing. It was a fun class :)
replica / new hardware that looks the same, with lights and buttons. Behind the panel is (from the one I looked at) an Arduino running an emulator. Don't know if the blinking lights respond the same or if the hardware switches, ports, etc work.
It depends, for the PDP-11, you can plug a FPGA https://obsolescence.dev/pdp11.html
Why no music, apl, mvs, vm, dos, … all kicking and alive under Hercules …