81–90 of 163 posts
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Dual (50% overclocked) Celerons on a BP6 was a relatively common enthusiast setup in the early 2000s. 128M of RAM was also not a huge amount then.
I bought one in 1998 or 1999 with dual 366s OCd to 700 each; anything over 700 was too unstable for my setup. I kept that thing running until 2008 or 2009. Great machine.
Had the dubious joy of managing Domain/OS Unix children inside the Apollo virtualisation method of the day. Along with Nixdorf, these systems were all through Civil Engineering and NMR facilities at the university campus. And, just like Nixdorf they came with multiple open CVE (didn't exist as a term of art at the time, but lets ignore the anachronism) such as the games user, well known passwords, root sendmail, you-…
Apollo DomainOS (Aegis) was technically better than Unix.
At some point (before my time), marketing must've decided they needed to be more Unix-compatible, and they did some clever things to also give it multiple Unix personalities (both SysV and BSD), while still keeping their original better personality.
One place you'd feel pain around then, on most any Unix platform, is in downloading "portable" code off the Internet. Even for code already made portable in some sense, you'd probably have at least modify the Makefile, if not at least one C file, to select what portability you wanted, or to work around flaws in their portability. (SunOS 4 was my favorite for awhile, and at least half the reason was that code I'd grab from an FTP site was usually easy to get running, because it was probably developed on either SunOS or at least another BSD. Ultrix was also OK.)
As a teen, I managed a porting lab, so I got to sysadmin and own-time develop on all of them. Writing portable C code for the different Unix workstations, I'd have to do it in a subset of K&R C, plus a portability mechanism that I built as I went (for architecture differences, library differences, C compiler differences).
I do recall the Apollos being one of the more annoying Unix workstation platforms for C. I think they preferred safer languages for systems programming (again, they were ahead of their time), and maybe they didn't go all-in on developer ergonomics for C. Also, I guess the compiler probably predated ANSI C.
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True, but there were wonderful exceptions. For instance, the Mac SE/30 (1989) could take up to 128 megs, and the Amiga 3000 (1990) was designed to allow for even more (although only 16 megs on the motherboard, but 256 meg Zorro III cards were available in 1993). Later, some m68k Macs like the Quadra 605 allowed for 128 meg SIMMs, and the PCI Power Macs really took things to a new level. The Power Mac 9500 could take…
Eh to be fair I think the main reason Zorro III RAM cards didn't appear until way after the first Zorro III machine is that Zorro III wasn't coupled to CPU speed so sticking RAM there wasn't great from a performance perspective - you really needed to use the CPU slot to extend beyond 18MB (remember the 2MB of Chip in addition to the 16MB of Fast) in a useful way
I don't recall the name of it though but I remember that it was a peculiar PCB design, with part of it resembling a breadboard. I think the name started with Ex, like Excelsior or Excalibur or something like that.
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Dual (50% overclocked) Celerons on a BP6 was a relatively common enthusiast setup in the early 2000s. 128M of RAM was also not a huge amount then.
Yes, I remember getting my Tualatin Celeron in 2003 with 256mb RAM. It was a beast compared to my friends machines at the time. :P
I love reading this stuff! Love seeing the fiber optics stuff at the end, every era had their own buzzwords with cool pictures! The only thing I don't like is the inside of the case, it reminds me of some dell or HP systems, densely packed stuff with lots of metal brackets that's hard to work with and probably "vacuum cleaner" style fans in it too (I don't see the fans in the fotos, but I just feel it from the looks…
Our science/electronics lab was given a bunch of Apollo workstations around 1990. Used for schematic capture and SPICE simulation. They were very powerful but one thing I most clearly remember was the absolutely weird graphical user interface they used, quite unlike anything before or since (and not in a good way). Does anyone remember what that was called? Edit: Domain/OS! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain/OS
(Maybe a bit like how Emacs is a power user platform, but if you stuck it in front of someone who only knew NOTEPAD.EXE mouse editing and File->Save, they'd be unaware of the Emacs power, and fixate on why the most basic things don't quite work how they thought everything works.)
There were some hints at the sophistication, like you could see that the windows with the command line shells in them were designed to support this. (Rather than the windows being emulators of character-cell terminals, like the command line windows we're still using almost everywhere else 40 years later.) And you could see the special function keys on the keyboard, and the strange bar at bottom of screen, and the indicator icons that appear in the titles of windows, though it'd take awhile to learn what they all they can do or mean. And you might be aware of how smoothly integrated the networking is, compared to everything else you'd seen.
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It was probably not dramatic if it was slower at all, there is a reason so many of those workstation processors died out in the 90s.
I at first thought a 486 was probably faster, but that Apollo CPU has 64 bit data path apparently. It might have been a beast. I didn't even know Apollo used anything but Motorola 68k CPUs.
I imagine these chips might have been optimized for throughput on well-suited and carefully tuned programs, where the compilers could be convinced to put out good code (since it was apparently something like a VLIW).
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Überpräzisionsberichterstattung
Google Translate accepts it, so I guess it's a word. Only one Google result though (this page).
I think every engineer had these in my 80186 clone group when I cooped at AMD, but I still had to submit SPICE timing simulation runs to the VAX mainframe. The CRT monitors were nice but huge.
What does cooping at AMD mean, does it mean a contract job? What is a 80186 clone group (a division at AMD designing 80186 clone CPUs, or a hobby group of 80186 PC enthusiasts?) But these machines are from 1988, wouldn't one be designing 386 or even 486 clones at that time?
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Quite a few Unix commands and concepts are exactly the same!
From 1988 you would watch b/w or 4 colours on PC made for offices being really expensive, and from y2k you could play DivX videos and TV at home. And from 2k-2k1, even under Unix at home too (something unthinkable by 1988) with some nice GNU/Linux distro :D. The technology change from 1988 to 1998 was really huge, much more compared to what you could get since 2010 until today.