The author seems to be unsure as to how widely the 2500UX was sold; I can confirm first hand that it was a real thing; I obtained parts of one from a dumpster dive at a Canadian university in the early 2000s. Sadly the case was mangled by a friend who really wanted its floppy drive for an SGI Indy we'd found in an earlier haul...
(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...)
This is cool story! My uni's lab was all SGIs, IBM Risc 6000s and Sun workstations.
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.
I have always been fascinated - what are the reasons anyone would want a Unix workstation at that time over DOS/Windows? Can somebody come up with a few examples? Genuinely missing the knowledge, as I was using MS-DOS in the 90s.
In addition to what the others have said, the specs were often a generation or two of what was available in a generic Intel box. When it was introduced in 1993, the Indy, SGI's lowest-specced workstation, could handle 256 MB of RAM and was clocked at 100 MHz, which was way beyond anything you could get for a PC, and that's before even mentioning the dedicated graphics hardware for 3D and video workloads. If money was no/little object, then the workstation vendors were happy to take your hand. (And your wallet.)
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.)
Microsoft itself was a leading Unix vendor in the 1980s with Xenix.
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.
Memory protection was not possible on the 8086 and quite half-baked on the 80286 (you could switch to protected mode but then you lost access to hardware BIOS facilities that relied on real mode, and switching back to real mode required hard-faulting the processor because there was no architectural support for it). The Intel 80386 was the first fully-featured x86 CPU wrt. running memory protected OS's.
The reason being that they thought no one would care about those legacy MS-DOS applications, everyone would be running to adopt OS/2 on 286, hence no need to go back into real mode.
In hindsight, Microsoft seems to have lost two opportunities to already be on the forefront from UNIX, first with giving up on Xenix, then by not really embracing the POSIX subsystem on Windows NT.
Linux would never taken off in such alternative realities.
Not that it matters that much now with WSL, and Azure Linux.
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.
I've always associated Amigas with AmigaOS, and this is the first I heard about Unix. Why would you replace AmigaOS with Unix? Is it because it would be substantially cheaper than other 68030 Unix workstations?
As mentioned in the story, everybody with a 68k or RISC computer in the 1980s tried their hand at making a Unix workstation because the market was so lucrative.
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.
Nitpick: This was the 90s already. 68k based Sun gear was in the 80s but 90s was the RISC era already for Unix boxes. (except for NeXT I, they continued launching new 68k models into the 90s and got left behind)
GCC was largely ignored until Sun became the first UNIX vendor to have different SKUs for developers and plain users, quickly followed by other vendors.
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 remember getting one on loan from Commodore Netherlands around 1992-1993. We were an ISV back then, and CBM provided these machines to allow us to talk to their engineers back in Pennsylvania via email and Usenet. While the emails are not preserved, I did find a post I highly likely made using an A3000UX [1]. We had the machine dial in once per day to sync email and Usenet posts. Phone costs were high, so we had to keep the phone line open as short as possible. It was actually quite handy because picking up the phone in the Netherlands to talk to an engineer in the States was prohibitively expensive (around $9 per minute in todays money, iirc). It was my first use of The Internet.
I remember hearing this rumor back in the day (early 1990's.) I also owned an A3000 at the time. It never seemed believable since Sun already had 680x0 systems and they were clearly moving to Sparc.
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.
That the suggested deals don't make a lot of sense doesn't mean there weren't discussions. Maybe the discussions ended because the deals wouldn't have made sense.
Maybe discussions happened during development when it wasn't so obvious that they didn't make sense.
It was not - 68000 and 68020 (and 68030 of course) based systems were still sold later than that. The highest end mac in 1990 was 68030 based (https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_ii/specs/mac_iifx.htm...) and was prohibitively expensive. New 68030 models were still being introduced as late as 1994.
It’s a bit mixed, by 1990 most UNIX vendors were moving to various RISC architectures so a 68k based workstation would appear rather old fashioned for that market. People paid Serious money for a UNIX system to do Serious work, so why cheap out on yesterdays technology?
A/UX didn’t seem to do that well in the market either.
My uni had these, as I mentioned in a reply elsewhere on the thread. I'm curious to know what kind of Serious Work people here saw back in the day.
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.
68040’s weren’t really available in quantity when the IIfx was released. NextStations were closer to the end of 1990. Plus their 68040 Unix workstations felt DOA because all of NeXT’s competitors had moved to RISC. Sun had Sparc, DEC and SGI were on MIPS, IBM had POWER, HP had PA.
Yeah. As a teenager with an A3000 in 1991, I still would've loved to run AMIX though! A couple years later I got a used 386SX and played around with early Linux distros.
The author seems to be unsure as to how widely the 2500UX was sold; I can confirm first hand that it was a real thing; I obtained parts of one from a dumpster dive at a Canadian university in the early 2000s. Sadly the case was mangled by a friend who really wanted its floppy drive for an SGI Indy we'd found in an earlier haul...
(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...)
This is cool story! My uni's lab was all SGIs, IBM Risc 6000s and Sun workstations.
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.
I have always been fascinated - what are the reasons anyone would want a Unix workstation at that time over DOS/Windows? Can somebody come up with a few examples? Genuinely missing the knowledge, as I was using MS-DOS in the 90s.
In addition to what the others have said, the specs were often a generation or two of what was available in a generic Intel box. When it was introduced in 1993, the Indy, SGI's lowest-specced workstation, could handle 256 MB of RAM and was clocked at 100 MHz, which was way beyond anything you could get for a PC, and that's before even mentioning the dedicated graphics hardware for 3D and video workloads. If money was no/little object, then the workstation vendors were happy to take your hand. (And your wallet.)
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.)
Microsoft itself was a leading Unix vendor in the 1980s with Xenix.
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.
Memory protection was not possible on the 8086 and quite half-baked on the 80286 (you could switch to protected mode but then you lost access to hardware BIOS facilities that relied on real mode, and switching back to real mode required hard-faulting the processor because there was no architectural support for it). The Intel 80386 was the first fully-featured x86 CPU wrt. running memory protected OS's.
The reason being that they thought no one would care about those legacy MS-DOS applications, everyone would be running to adopt OS/2 on 286, hence no need to go back into real mode.
In hindsight, Microsoft seems to have lost two opportunities to already be on the forefront from UNIX, first with giving up on Xenix, then by not really embracing the POSIX subsystem on Windows NT.
Linux would never taken off in such alternative realities.
Not that it matters that much now with WSL, and Azure Linux.
Multi-tasking that didn't suck.
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.
[dead]
I've always associated Amigas with AmigaOS, and this is the first I heard about Unix. Why would you replace AmigaOS with Unix? Is it because it would be substantially cheaper than other 68030 Unix workstations?
As mentioned in the story, everybody with a 68k or RISC computer in the 1980s tried their hand at making a Unix workstation because the market was so lucrative.
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.
Nitpick: This was the 90s already. 68k based Sun gear was in the 80s but 90s was the RISC era already for Unix boxes. (except for NeXT I, they continued launching new 68k models into the 90s and got left behind)
Amiga OS was a kind of plan B, as they originally were thinking of UNIX, when we listen to history from Commodore employees.
I was really happy they went and did their own thing, classical UNIX was never great at multimedia.
And yet... !
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!
GCC was largely ignored until Sun became the first UNIX vendor to have different SKUs for developers and plain users, quickly followed by other vendors.
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 remember getting one on loan from Commodore Netherlands around 1992-1993. We were an ISV back then, and CBM provided these machines to allow us to talk to their engineers back in Pennsylvania via email and Usenet. While the emails are not preserved, I did find a post I highly likely made using an A3000UX [1]. We had the machine dial in once per day to sync email and Usenet posts. Phone costs were high, so we had to keep the phone line open as short as possible. It was actually quite handy because picking up the phone in the Netherlands to talk to an engineer in the States was prohibitively expensive (around $9 per minute in todays money, iirc). It was my first use of The Internet.
[1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.multimedia/c/Vyt0...
I remember hearing this rumor back in the day (early 1990's.) I also owned an A3000 at the time. It never seemed believable since Sun already had 680x0 systems and they were clearly moving to Sparc.
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.
That the suggested deals don't make a lot of sense doesn't mean there weren't discussions. Maybe the discussions ended because the deals wouldn't have made sense.
Maybe discussions happened during development when it wasn't so obvious that they didn't make sense.
A brand new 68030 system in 1990 seems DOA to me.
It was not - 68000 and 68020 (and 68030 of course) based systems were still sold later than that. The highest end mac in 1990 was 68030 based (https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_ii/specs/mac_iifx.htm...) and was prohibitively expensive. New 68030 models were still being introduced as late as 1994.
It’s a bit mixed, by 1990 most UNIX vendors were moving to various RISC architectures so a 68k based workstation would appear rather old fashioned for that market. People paid Serious money for a UNIX system to do Serious work, so why cheap out on yesterdays technology?
A/UX didn’t seem to do that well in the market either.
My uni had these, as I mentioned in a reply elsewhere on the thread. I'm curious to know what kind of Serious Work people here saw back in the day.
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.
CAD/CAM was a pretty common reason to have an early Sparc workstation.
A/UX failure had more to do with Apple's approach to it, and their relationship with IBM, than anything else.
The IIfx wasn't expensive (or fast) because it had a 68030, also it was DOA lol
680x0 systems weren't "DOA" in the consumer space yet. I would be another ~4 years until the Mac PowerPC transition.
Macs weren't really consumer devices except for some rich americans, but Amigas were.
You’re eliding the point by saying “680x0”
The NextStation had a 68040 and it released in 1990. I didn’t say the entire 68k architecture my dude.
68040’s weren’t really available in quantity when the IIfx was released. NextStations were closer to the end of 1990. Plus their 68040 Unix workstations felt DOA because all of NeXT’s competitors had moved to RISC. Sun had Sparc, DEC and SGI were on MIPS, IBM had POWER, HP had PA.
Indeed, im glad we can agree a UNIX workstation (as alluded to in the article) with a 68030 in 1990 was DOA
Yeah. As a teenager with an A3000 in 1991, I still would've loved to run AMIX though! A couple years later I got a used 386SX and played around with early Linux distros.