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On 7 Nov 2007, at 18:20, Simon Waters wrote: > 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. > I realise I'm in the minority but I like the idea of stuff that just goes on working, but I want it both ways, I want it upgradeable. Perhaps you just have to settle for buy, use for 3 or 4 years and upgrade. However, I know of a guy who runs a HP-UX machine that's 9 years old and has never been rebooted. Clare -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html