[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
On Thu, 9 Jan 2014, Simon Waters wrote:
I suspect I would have liked the SUN workstations that City University had in 1988 if I'd spent any longer playing on them, I assume they were SUN-4's and was my first exposure to that sort of high-end workstation. Seems funny to call it high end now.
They were Sun 3's in '88. 16MHz 68030 and 4MB of RAM (if maxed out). I used them when I moved to Bristol (about 89). We quickly outgrew them and an add-on board let us upgrade them to 12MB (pull processor & MMU out, plug into add-on board, plug cpu back in)
(Megabytes in-case anyone think's its a typo) Sun 4's were Sparc based and came a little later.I had a Sun Ultra 5 workstation and a pair of Enterprise 2 servers at home for a while. Turned them on when I wanted to heat the room up, but that's about all they were good for. (366MHz Sparcs with 4GB of RAM - actually a lot of RAM for the time)
It's a shame the Sparc never really lived up to the expectations. I liked it as an architecture (wrote a lot of assembler for them at one time) The "S" in Sparc stands for Scalable, but they never seemed to get that fast to me.
One place I worked had some top-end Sparc servers to run chip design simulations on - took 2 days to complete. They then got some big HP boxes (J5600?) - took it down to 1 day - then they got some big Opteron boxes running Linux - 2 hours and the Sparcs remained switched off after that.
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq