Quote:
Originally Posted by murg
I remember using the Apollo Aegis Unix-like workstation in the 80s...
Huge screen, windowed Unix, touchpad on the keyboard. I loved it. Especially as I was also dealing with mega-advanced MS-DOS based graphics with 2 palettes of 4 colours each at the time.
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Originally our group ran on IBM 360/370 (even a PC/370) and Crays.
Got too expensive and timesharing too unproductive so we looked for alternatives.
We started with sample SGIs and SUNs, committed to a big 1st Gen RS6000 network (because of the monster floating point power and adhoc clustering). $3M in hardware for 20 people. Next gen we migrated to UltraSparc for under $500K and later to DELL XEON workstations for under $100K. After that, all the core codes ran native NT instead of UNIX and a refresh runs maybe $30K. We've been running Windows tablets all century.
Big believers in distributed computing over glass house systems, my bosses.
Through all that (we migrated work from crays to PCs in barely a decade) productivity went up by 100x. (10X better fidelity, 10x throughput).