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Re: [LUG] OT: VMS 30 today

 

Rob Beard wrote:
> Clare Shepherd wrote:
> 
>> Are Unix workstations still used, and if so what for.
> 
> Well when I was working at the scientific research lab about 5 years ago 
> they were slowly moving over to Linux (RedHat 9 at the time) as it was 
> cheaper to buy a reasonable spec desktop machine and dual boot with 
> Windows XP or single boot RedHat than spend out for a Sun workstation. 

Experience here similar, I use to do a lot of Unix admin work for
desktop Unix. Solaris and HP-UX mainly. Towards the end the IBM PCs were
reaching the point where they could compete in terms of computing power
and graphics capabilities, and the pricing of the Unix kit meant that
they priced themselves out of that market. Replacement was more often
Windows rather than Linux in my experience, not least a lot of folks
were doing work that required decent graphics cards, and at the time
Linux graphics driver support wasn't that great.

Prior to that a lot of the high end CAD packages use to be written to
support a small range of graphics cards (because things like OpenGL
didn't exist, or weren't up to the job), so you had to buy a SUN, or an
HP, or SGI workstation, and it had to have specific cards to work
effectively.

That said the quality on some of the Unix workstation kit was extremely
good, and there are still people using them, but it is pretty small numbers.

Whilst Clare says she'd pay for quality, when push came to shove, almost
all businesses couldn't justify the quality being offered. Also there
was a lot of convergence in hardware, towards the end apart from a few
novel processors (PA-Risc and Ultra-Sparc) the components were often off
the shelf PC components, as they represented best value for money.

Arguably Apple won the make bespoke Unix desktop hardware battle, by
switching to Unix when everyone else seemed to have all but given up the
fight.

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