hapless (u/hapless) - Readit News

hapless commented on The curious case of the Unix workstation layout thejpster.org.uk/blog/blo... · Posted by u/ingve

pinewurst · a month ago

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.

hapless · a month ago

Indigo R3000 was VME-based, a derivative of the 4D/35 and firends

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

hapless commented on The curious case of the Unix workstation layout thejpster.org.uk/blog/blo... · Posted by u/ingve

sugarpimpdorsey · a month ago

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.

hapless · a month ago

Back in 1993, a $5k SGI had ~5x as much CPU power as a $10k x86 PC. Not a joke. You could get a 100 MHz R4000PC that would happily drive a display at 1280x1024 for the price of a 33 MHz 486 that would run Windows 3.x at 640x480

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.

hapless commented on The curious case of the Unix workstation layout thejpster.org.uk/blog/blo... · Posted by u/ingve

whartung · a month ago

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.

hapless · a month ago

The 712 was already a better NeXTstation than the actual NeXTstation at the time

It cost half as much and had considerably more CPU power

There is a reason NeXT decided to become a software company...

hapless commented on The curious case of the Unix workstation layout thejpster.org.uk/blog/blo... · Posted by u/ingve

grewil2 · a month ago

Let’s not forget Amiga 3000UX - a workstation released with Amiga Unix, a full port of AT&T Unix System V Release 4 (SVR4). Notable users include Free Software Foundation staff programmers who used it at MIT to help further some early development of the GNU operating system.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_3000UX

hapless · a month ago

The 3000UX was dead on arrival

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.

hapless commented on The curious case of the Unix workstation layout thejpster.org.uk/blog/blo... · Posted by u/ingve

ChuckMcM · a month ago

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.

hapless · a month ago

In the 1990s none of that stuff was made in mainland China, not even the cases. A great deal was made in Taiwan. Even more was still made in the USA.

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.

hapless commented on The curious case of the Unix workstation layout thejpster.org.uk/blog/blo... · Posted by u/ingve

hapless · a month ago

Indigo2 is just convergent evolution.

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

hapless commented on WeightWatchers files bankruptcy wsj.com/articles/weightwa... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

cmcaleer · 4 months ago

I'm not sure why this is being framed as an Ozempic story, when if anything it seems like it's more of a cautionary tale on not taking on $1.5 billion dollars of debt to buy back shares near all-time highs and crippling your company for over a decade before ultimately forcing it to file for bk.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/weight-watchers-ann...

Its stock tumbled ever since those highs and likely wouldn't have ever recovered had Oprah not bought and pumped it. To this day they still carry over a billion dollars in debt.

In fairness to the WW board of the last couple of years, they did make a of reasonable pivot to try to rectify the ship (like buying a telehealth service which prescribed Ozempic), but ultimately it seems like this buyback from 13 years ago created a burden that just made them unable to weather the storm gracefully.

hapless · 4 months ago

Stock buybacks are substantially equivalent to dividends. You issue a dividend when you have nothing to invest in that will develop shareholder value. Buybacks work the same way. You have a stock of capital, or a great borrowing opportunity, and nothing to do with it.

Most companies always have another idea to do a new thing, that might induce growth. WW did not. WW has been in trouble for decades, because their business model pre-supposes consumers are too stupid to use a search engine. (Does "weight watchers" work? No. No it doesn't.)

The debt-for-buyback swap is a symptom, not a cause. Management had nowhere to go, no vision for growth, and when you are out of ideas and you are offered an attractive loan, you do a buyback.

hapless commented on Joining Sun Microsystems – 40 years ago (2022) akapugs.blog/2022/05/03/6... · Posted by u/TMWNN

ajross · 4 months ago

Never heard of that particular product, but in point of fact Sun's original core workstation market had been essentially destroyed by the late 90's by x86 boxes running Windows NT. Intel didn't have the product in the channel in 1992, but by 1996 it was clear SPARC's days were numbered.

hapless · 4 months ago

Wrecking the workstation market was easy, because workstations had small numbers of CPUs, and small pools of RAM. Intel started fucking up that market in the late 1980s.

x86 wasn't competitive on the server side until K8 (AMD) and Nehalem (Intel).

So you have a real long stretch -- 1987-ish to 2008-ish -- where proprietary UNIX on proprietary architectures owns the server side, even though the workstation market is eroding the whole time.

hapless commented on Joining Sun Microsystems – 40 years ago (2022) akapugs.blog/2022/05/03/6... · Posted by u/TMWNN

chasil · 4 months ago

Then how do you explain StrongARM?

Why would DEC indulge in an also-ran? Ken Olsen's folly? Or is 1996 far too late?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM

hapless · 4 months ago

DEC indulged an enormous number of also-rans. It is from the perspective of 2025 that we remember some of the good stuff and forget all the bizarre mis-fires.

Off the top of my head:

* Two duplicate "high-end" VAX architectures (VAX 8000 vs VAX 9000), because no one wanted to choose between CMOS and ECL

* Three duplicate systems targeted at the high-end (Alpha, VAX 9000, VAX 8000)

* Two duplicate RISC+UNIX systems, because DEC was extremely late to market (MIPS 3000/5000 series vs Alpha)

* Two duplicate UNIX software packages, because DEC was really late to market (1970s ULTRIX ported to MIPS, OSF/1 on Alpha, and the never-fucking-released OSF/1 on MIPS because DEC just could not get their shit together)

* Four duplicate low end systems (MIPS, PDP-11, NVAX, Alpha were all sold simultaneously at the same price point!)

* A dozen utterly-failed microcomputer projects (Pro/3xx, Rainbow, etc)

DEC was not a particularly well-managed company. Their approach, for decades, was "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks." This worked fine right up until it didn't work at all.

It is also worth noting that Alpha, the "good" DEC initiative, was a failure. It lost a lot of money! market share never got out of the single digits.

hapless commented on AI Will Upend a Basic Assumption About How Companies Are Organized bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/thm

hapless · 6 months ago

Azeem Azhar never has to worry about employment in an AI-obsessed world -- no executive worth his salt will ever be satisfied with an AI-based lickspittle. You need the genuine human article for that.