I'm the proud owner of an Ultra-1. It's 64 bits, but this particular machine doesn't really fly in 64 bits mode (needs an U-2 for that). Anyway, it works great, and currently run dnetc :)
I also have an SGI Octane (a wonderful machine, really) and an Indy (unfortunately this one recently failed self-tests, though it's only 17 years old). I still enjoy the noise coming from the Octane TRAMs under load :)
These unix boxen used to cost 10000 to 50 000 bucks when I used them professionally, that's a particular sort of pervert pleasure to own them for almost nothing :)
edit: I just dug up the Silicon Graphics product sales guide from 1996. It gives list prices from SGI, Sun, HP, IBM, DEC workstations: all in the 9-16K$ range for the base configuration (double for proper RAM, screen, etc). The software from Alias|Wavefront and friends, however, was mind-bogglingly expensive : up to 75000$. So a fully loaded workstation with a complete software pack was well in the 100000$ range.
This takes me back to the first summer internship I had, where I was plopped in front of an SS5 back in 1998. I was a 17 year old kid who had a 486 at home, so this machine with no removable disks whatsoever really perplexed me. Then I realized I could walk to any workstation in the lab, sign in, and my homedir and everything would be right there, while everything ran off the app server transparently. "The network is the computer" blew my mind.
Our group's web server at the time was on a quad-CPU 50 MHz SS20. I can't imagine what that thing had to have cost when it was new.
In 2001, when I was in college, some lab in my engineering school decided to dump some SS5's. My roommates and I rescued a handful of them from the dumpster, and then mixed and matched parts from them so we'd have three decent machines. We set them up on a table made from an old cable spool, and on any given weekday evening there'd be three or four people coding away on them.
It's sort of funny, if you can find an old HP PA-RISC 712, or Sun SS20 you can throw NeXTstep (OS-X) on it and it'll keep up with modern machines just fine. Wordprocessors will open up just as fast as your modern machine (without an ssd), mathematica keeps up with whatever you throw at it, and emacs is just fine.
I'm still not entirely sure what happened to the last 15 years of performance gains.
EDIT: I got through college in 2000 onwards using a nextstation turbo. mathematica and openwrite handled things just fine. I'm confident I could cope reasonable well with that setup again if I had to.
Between 2000 and 2010, computers should have gotten about 100 times faster (assuming speed increases by 2^(10/1.5) - yeah I know that's not really Moore's law, but let's assume it's almost reasonable).
Your server class SS20 was about 5 years ahead of commodity boxes. This was the days when servers (or workstations) were much faster than consumer boxes.
A computer these days will spend most of it's time at 1-5%. That's with a heavyweight OS, multiple applications open, and modern applications (which are not built to be frugal).
So, while your computer would be almost capable of running a modern workload. It would hang, now and then, if you tried compiling or running a badly written flash app, but otherwise would be fine.
Most of the last 15 years of performance gains have allowed consumer computers to catch up with workstations, made occasional tasks (like importing documents, and compiling small programs) almost instantaneous (rather than annoyingly slow), and allowed programmers to fill up the screen with eye candy.
I'm pretty sure that the subjectively fastest machine I've ever used was a Sparcstation 4/330 with a monochrome screen about 1990 or so (I'm pretty sure it had a ridiculous amount of RAM for the time, 72MB or something).
With SunOS and the vanilla X11R4 build it really was quite nippy.
When I started in resesearch back in 2000, every self-respecting theoretical physicist would have some kind of special-purpose workstation sitting around. I learned Unix on the astronomy department's Suns, before switching to a much funkier-looking AlphaStation when I switched departments.
They were the last of a dying breed, though. By circa 2003 when they were up for replacement there was really no point in having one of these over a high-end commodity box running Linux.
Circa 2011, my next "workstation" will probably be a MacBook Air. With the rise of cheap commodity clusters there's really no point in even trying to have signficiant number-crunching power on your own desk.
I don't miss the Suns though. They were a bastard to use.
One interesting thing we discovered about IPXs late one night in the lab is that they're FCC Class A devices -- that is, they didn't have the same level of RF shielding as consumer Class B gear. How did we exploit this? The memory bus timings happened to be in the FM radio range (~90-110 MHz), so by copying buffers in tight loops we were able to create a tone generator with a 10-20 foot transmit range.
I do hope the professors with nearby offices (and conveniently with radios on their desks) enjoyed our looping rendition of the Close Encounters of the Third Kind theme when they came in the next morning.
In 2000 one of my housemates found a few of these "lunchbox" systems, bought a big piece of glass, and made the IPXes the 'legs' of our coffee table 'cluster'. Trying to track down a picture now...
It was extremely cool, but we couldn't really come up with a good use for it outside of running John the Ripper.
First sun workstation I ever physically used (I'd used remote servers over terminal sessions for years).
Got a new job, and they plunked an IPX down in front of me with a 20" sun monitor.
"will that do?"
(I knew nothing about the IPX - I did know sunos/solaris rather well from a cli point of view).
That thing was slow as heck, but damn if it wasn't fun fun fun to have my own SUN!
(In 1995 that was cool)
You need to understand two things looking at that photo:
- The pizza box design for workstations and servers was really hot in the 90s (btw the ones from NeXT starting the ball moving as I recall)
- I realize that looks like a pile of junk today but back in the day each of those machines was a small fortune (I'm guessing over $10k each)
The pizza box design is older than that. The Sun 3/50 and 3/60 from 1986 or so were the first I'm aware of. The Sparcstation design is a straightforward evolution. NeXT shipped cubes (without hard drives...) first in 1988. The NeXTstation pizza box wasn't until a later iteration in maybe 91 or so.
And $10k is about right. You could pay less if you skimped on memory (I think most of the various workstations were around $6k for a minimal configuration), and much much more if you bought the fancy framebuffer cards.
I still have my NeXTStation Turbo Color. Damn thing still runs, too. I run it a bit in the winter for amusement, and to help heat my apartment; I'm pretty sure it's more efficient at doing than than my electric wall heaters.
Having this machine in 1996 on a 7Mbps DSL line made me feel like God. So, so far ahead of its time.
The sparc pizza box was first. The SS1 was coming out around the same time that NeXT was moving the cube from floptical-only to allowing a built-in hard drive.
Man, this takes me back. I still have a bunch of IPXs and SS5s in my garage someplace, and if they have an OS at all, they have OpenBSD. I finally turned them off because of the power draw relative to their functionality.
Recently, I've had reason to set up systems of various types from that era. Frankly, SunOS 4.1.3 is a dream compared to consumer stuff like Macs running System 7, or PCs with Windows 3.1. Sure, it isn't going to run modern software, but you can reliably do things in the shell, and quickly, that are tedious on those other systems. Great stuff!
It's interesting; those machines were very different from consumer gear of the time. Especially the lack of necessity around the video card and local keyboard/mouse. You could just as easily boot with console being a serial port.
Modern PCs can use EFI over a serial console so they're a lot closer these days.
(Fun fact: Sun once made a 386-based workstation.)
I have a few Fire v210's (dual 1Ghz UltraSparc 3, NUMA architecture with RAM attached to processor), and they run great. Quad gig ethernet ports on them, and a very nice LOM coprocessor. Decently cheap too.
I also ran NetBSD on a 25Mhz 68040 Quadra 700 back in the early 2000's. That was a less than stellar experience.
I once collected old workstations and servers. (DEC, SGI, and Data General...) But after filling a house full of old silicon that could be out-preformed by cheap white boxes with better software, I let go of my nostalgia and sold the lot to collectors and scrap dealers. There's a few interesting circuit boards on the wall of my office, but old crap is mostly crap compared to this decades technology.
If I feel like visiting the past, I break out the soldering iron and work on radios or help a buddy do some embedded work. Nothing like twiddling bits with gcc or constructing antennas to bring back the glory days...
A great use for this would be to connect to a remote X-server and have the applications execute there. Then he could use a mix of remotely executing apps and native local apps to get his work done on this awesome machine!
Wow - I used to use one of those. An I have another sun pizzabox (and the metal grid mousepad and the red laser mouse, and the full sun keyboard!) kicking around in storage somewhere..... sun4.
(Lower model than the SS20 in the box)
I think it has 4 megs of ram and a 100 meg disk or something (possibly smaller).
I do recall leaving it with Debian installed - if it isn't destroyed by some other physical means it'll probably boot, and I may even remmeber the password.
I'm sure some veterans from Sun or maybe Fujitsu could do it, but I think the CPU architectures have changed enough that it would be painful...
There are probably lots of applications for which -- if you can't find hardware -- it is easy enough to compile on an old version of RedHat using x86 hardware, instead. Either way, what starts to kill you is tracking down old proprietary software like specific versions of Motif.
edit: I just dug up the Silicon Graphics product sales guide from 1996. It gives list prices from SGI, Sun, HP, IBM, DEC workstations: all in the 9-16K$ range for the base configuration (double for proper RAM, screen, etc). The software from Alias|Wavefront and friends, however, was mind-bogglingly expensive : up to 75000$. So a fully loaded workstation with a complete software pack was well in the 100000$ range.