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Comment by rbranson | Hacker News Reader

I love all the nostalgia, but the post doesn't really answer the most interesting part of the title: why do workstations matter? I was really hoping there was some revelation in there!

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Alan Kay attributes a big part of the advances of PARC to the custom workstations they built for themselves. They cost $20k(?) but ran much faster than off the shelf high-end machines at a time when Moore’s Law was accelerating CPU speed dramatically. He says it let them work on machines from the future so they had plenty of time to make currently-impossible software targeting where them common machines would be when they finished it.

It also helps if you are Alan Kay or the other talents that were at PARC back then. What future would you create if you had a custom $100K (2022 dollars) workstation?

The NVIDIA DGX Station A100 has a list price of $149k, I believe. It's a workstation that's advertised as an "AI data center in a box":

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-station-a100/

That looks like it would be an absolute hoot to experiment with, but I don't know what I could possibly do with one that would generate a return on $150K. What would you do?

In some circumstances making a hedge fund model 0.001% better would return 10x that.

John Carmack tweeted about buying one a while back. I'm not sure if a DGX on your desk does anything for working with ML at the bleeding edge, though, since those all run on megaclusters of A100s or TPUs.

What's he doing with it?

AI stuff: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2547632585...

I think we tend to overestimate how "good" those people were. Yes they were definitely good professionals, but they happened to be in a very special place at a special time with very few constraints compared to how we work now. It was a lot easier for them to innovate than for any of us now.

Folks at PARC designed and built their own PDP-10 clone to get around internal politics. It's hard to overestimate the amount of talent concentrated there at the time.

It always looks like all the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked. So, stop looking for low-hanging fruit.

And they did it as a warm-up before tackling something difficult.

They were working in a total vacuum. Computers were classically giant things that simply tabulated or ran physics simulations. To create an entire well articulated vision of HCI is extremely difficult and requires both creativity and technical competence. I would not make such statements that it was easier to innovate then. In fact, I’d say it’s way easier to innovate now that so much exists to play with and mix and match, not to mention the ability to have perspective on negatives of assumptions previously made that can be corrected.

well... not a TOTAL vacuum. a number of the PARC people (thinking of Tesler & Kay) were intimately familiar with Englebart's work at SRI. When the ARC (Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at SRI) was winding down and PARC was staffing up, the people who left first were supposedly those who rejected the "brittleness" of the expert-focused software ARC developed.

It's definitely true that the cost of implementing a frame buffer fell well into the affordable range as they were moving to PARC. And politics at PARC made it easy to say you were developing a system for "inexpert document managers." They were definitely exploring new ideas about HCI as PC hardware was emerging. But Larry Tessler was pretty clear that Lisa learned what not to do from looking at the Alto & Star. And the Alto & Star learned what not to do by looking at various bits of ARC software. And Engelbart was adamant his team not repeat the UI/UX mistakes of ITS.

So sure... they were trailblazers, but they had a good idea of where they wanted to go.

> So sure... they were trailblazers, but they had a good idea of where they wanted to go.

And where would that be? Not so obvious. Stick in a random person and they’d have no idea. You could easily say the same thing today. Are you not wanting to make the mistakes of all previous computing and know the direction it should take? If you do, and you’re able to execute and change the direction of computing, you’d be a very rare talent indeed.

Ah, the old "they didn't earn that but lucked into it" argument.

so you're saying if those SPECIFIC people didn't exist we wouldn't have modern computers. I know Hacker News suffers from an extreme case of hero worship / cult of personality but I can't agree that technology and more generally progress works that way. Every new development is child of its time, talented people HAVE to meet with opportunity to generate extraordinary results, but I don't think Alan Kay is any more extraordinary as a human than anyone I work with, he just had an above average opportunity available to him and he seized it.

Same for Page/Brin, find someone as smart as they were and try starting Google now, I bet it's not gonna go the same way.

I am currently working with a hardware start-up, that happens to have "some monies" in the bank to deliver what we need. And if I was asked to describe how the culture inside the company feels, I would say "like the early days of NeXT." There's money here to do what we want, there's technically smart guys in the room, nothing is off the table in terms of what we're willing to try, we have a vision of what we want to build, nobody is being an architecture astronaut, all of us have shipped product before and know what it takes.

Where I am going with all this is that what we're trying to build, the consumer grade hardware to run it won't exist for two more years so we're having to use really beefy workstations in our day-to-day work. Not quite PARC level of built-from-scratch customization, but not exactly cheap consumer grade desktops either.

Are you creating an OS and/or softball as well there?

We are not creating a custom OS at this time. We have to be aware of the limits of what we can achieve given the size of our team and the desire to actually get to market in a timely fashion. That said, there's heavy customization of the OS we are using, along with some bare metal "OS? Where we're going we don't need no steenking OS" work. We're more focused on the h/w, the UI and UX that interfaces between the h/w and the user, and the graphics pipeline.

Sounds interesting, thanks!

A long time ago I suggested developing on Xeon Phi-based workstations because, in order to run well on future computers, you need to be able to run on lots of slow cores. The idea kind of still holds. These days the cores are quite fast and running on one or two of them gives acceptable performance, but if you can manage to run on all cores, your software will be lightning fast.

Yes, we're very much taking a distributed, multi-threaded approach, but at the same time, the distributed parts are still local to the user.

They allow you to spend much less time thinking about resource constraints and/or performance optimization and just focus on what you're trying to get done and/or do more than would be possible with conventional systems. Workstations let you buy your way past many limitations.

The closest example today would be people like developers, AI researchers, 3D designers and video editors buying high-end video cards (quite possibly multiple) running in Threadripper systems. They're paying up for GPU power and huge amounts of cores/RAM/IO bandwidth/whatever to either do something that isn't feasible on a lower end system or to complete their work much more quickly.

This is correct. I do video and 3D with a Threadripper 3990X with 128GB RAM and a 3090 because I don't want to even think about computational restraints. It is overkill for 95% of my work but, that other 5% where I am rendering something arduous, it pays off.

I think an analogy to supercars is pretty relevant. They are a minuscule percentage of cars developed/sold but have a disproportionate influence on the car market overall.

I'm sure there are analogies for a lot of other industries as well.

Also - there is no cloud, just someone else's computer. Which is why I will never rely on something like a Chromebook, the web or other modern day equivalents of dumb terminals :)

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