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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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