Can someone enlighten me as to why these things were $30k new?

Can someone enlighten me as to why these things were $30k new?
It was a UNIX workstation which means it only processed text (look at any user manual on Unix and it's the same shit /bin/sh, sed, vi, troff)
Why would someone pay this kind of money for such a simple computer to edit text?

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To write the next great American Novel!

It's a UNIX system... I know this.

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Seriously guys, wtf?
$60,000 for dual processor?

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Why can't you buy 2 model 140s and tape them together?
That's 285 Mhz at less than a third of the price PD the model 2200.

becasue the 2200 is 200mhzX2 so that's like 400mhz.

because it was brand new technology, computers back in the 80s and 90s were really only for businesses, it was also revolutionary because it wasent just a screen and keyboard. It played music, it processed picture, it did alot of shit no other computer can do. Funny thing is that alot of early computers were made in america, it wasen't till bill clinton changed shit around, if we never let china do our shit computers would still be expensive as shit.

Unix has a graphical interface. These workstations were used for rendering work and the like - stuff you couldn't do in Windows or Mac OS at the time.

My dad's work used Sun and Apple machines when they were 680X0 based because that was the base of their networking hardware which they built. They continued to use Sun SPARCstations because they were easy to cluster and Linux/BSD hadn't really caught on yet. It made Windows NT look like a toy.

>It was a UNIX workstation which means it only processed text
whats that on the screen then?

But this was 1996. Hell we had games with polygonal graphics on windows 95.

>windows 95
Ah, the good old days of having to reboot everytime a minor change was made.

If you needed to do 3d, you bought an SGI machine and ran IRIX. If you needed to solve complex problems and run simulations across dozens of machines, Sun was cheaper.

Well it's a graphical workstation, who cares about uptime, especially when you know you're going ot change something.
I mean what kept you from just running dual pentium pro 200's and NT with direct3d drivers?
Or redhat.

Professional Unix systems had commerical support. Hell freebsd use to have a lot of games. It's actually still a decent gaming platform if you like rpg games.

Why that thing were a couple million dollars new? It couldn't even process text.
Also in your pic it's clearly doing graphics

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Well, I don't think there was much in the way of professional 3d cards for the PC at the time.
1996 was the time period of the first 3dfx voodoo cards, but these were tuned for speed rather than precision: limited internal depth, limited depth buffer precision etc. Not something gamers would care about, but you wouldn't want it for professional work.

The sort of cards that professionals would use would be sold in small numbers and therefore cost a fucktonne. Lower sales numbers is probably a lot of where the high prices of workstations came from.

Math/Stats people in the 90's working for the government would have used them for election models, etc. because most of their colleges at the time used BSD and C, so it would have made sense to buy one. Compiler were expensive and vb5/6 was brand new in 99' so options were limited OP.

SGI had OpenGL, 3dfx used Glide, Apple had QuickDraw3d, and Microsoft was last out of the gate with Direct3d which didn't become relevant until 5.0.

True, but someone doing professional graphics probably would want something more powerful than a software implementation, and the gaming cards probably weren't up to par either.

Also, for 3D work, floating point performance was important, and one of the areas sgi/sun performance was significantly better was in FPU performance at the time..

So when did wintel take over the CAD market?
Was it a year later?

looks like a screengrab from windows95, desu.

I suppose I'd say 1998-1999 was probably when that went over.

Windows 2000 maybe?

Why do you people even reply to this thread? It's so obvious bait it hurts.

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>uses slow 3D file manager instead of terminal
Love that part of the movie

Novell may have been american, but wasn't that great

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We used Sun Sparc machines exclusively for weather satellite acquisition, processing, and display for the USN up until 2001 when we moved to x86 processors running Linux.

probably for anything high precision at the time. like practically all engineering and science. what was the bitness compared to other systems? also much better I/O , it's not all about the jigglehertz

Unix shills are desperate people, they will happily eat up any shitty bait to be able to brag about their outdated shitty OS

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You're just wrong and probably jealous of larger anatomy (m or f).

a e s t h e t i c

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And you're just continuously replying to bait
Who's the retard here again?

Many times repies to bait, grasshopper, one may educate the dull and ignorant.

Holy shit, you can joke about UNIX tards, but to actually be right and find one that replies with 90's meme Tao or related shit UNIX retards actually like. This is gold.
I guess it's all fun and games until it gets serious and now you regret even making fun of people who can't help to be mentally challenged.

Dullness and ignorance is usually by choice, if not enforced by the workplace/environment. You seem to lose sight of the fact that Unix (in all its flavors) was here before the 'pop' OSes and will be here after the normies (lookin' at you, sailor) succumb to brain death from using systems that cater to popular conceptions.

Sun wanted them to be too expensive to sustain in the long run. The idea was to make Linux and BSD more appealing by conflation with computers which cost more than a luxury car but didn’t have too.

Scott McNealy was the first Linux advocate.

>and will be here after the normies
99% of supercomputer and cluster OS share is Linux.
No UNIX.

Solaris 11 and HP-UX are probably the closest commercial Unices that is still supported.
No, macOS is not a direct UNIX descendant.

So come again?

You may have noticed my use of the phrase 'in all its flavors'. The implication is we're talking about Solaris/SunOS, linux, IRIX, HP-UX, BSD, or any other variant. It's a question of the philosophy of OS design and the way to do things. There's enough commonality between them to move from one OS to another without a horrendous amount of grief. I've maintained and administered Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX, and linux machines in a heterogenous environment and can attest to that.