Comment by stephenhuey
11 hours ago
Makes me feel like we're back in the era of SGI workstations in the late 20th century! I got to play with a few of those in college.
11 hours ago
Makes me feel like we're back in the era of SGI workstations in the late 20th century! I got to play with a few of those in college.
still cheap compared to those things. lab down the hall in grad school had an onyx [1] with the fancy polarized shutter 3d glasses for playing what we called "chem tv" or semi-empirical small molecule docking experiments - that was something like $250k or so in the early 90s.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Onyx
Yes but they were heavy.
They were built like a brick shithouse and felt expensive. You always knew they belonged to someone else.
In other words you couldn't mistake them for an $800 Mac Mini.
Now try imagining a SGI workstation with 512GB of SOLDERED DOWN RAM. You can't because no one would have bought them.
To be fair, these are significantly larger than a Mac Mini. More like one of the old Macintosh Quadras or Performas.
But your main point still stands.
Quadras and Performas were in full mini-tower or desktop configurations.
This thing looks like the ashtray you'd find next to it.
Anyway I'd get the same feeling every time I opened a Sun server. The metal work alone felt like fine industrial craftsmanship.