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Comment by hapless | Hacker News Reader

In the 80s and 90s, they were significantly faster and more capable than their PC / Mac analogues. Double or triple the speeds and feeds, ten times the price ;)

By the 2000s the advantages had more or less vanished and the workstation SKUs were discontinued one by one.

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PC’s were stuck with awful hardware for a long time, but the Mac story is a bit more complicated — once they became available, higher-end 68020/68030 Macs were sometimes competitive with workstations.

No. Mac II's showed up in the late 80's just as the workstation vendors were moving off 68k hardware and onto SPARC and MIPS. PA and POWER came along a few years after that, then Alpha a bit later still. Motorola never got back in the game, really, though Intel caught up with the release of the P6 in 1995.

> Motorola never got back in the game

I though POWER was born as a child of IBM and Motorola.

PowerPC, not POWER: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance

Absolutely not! The MacOS was terrible; no functioning virtual memory, no memory protection between processes.

This is only considering part of the question, which makes it a false comparison.

Classic MacOS had pretty much the best UI on any mass-market computer ever made.

And that's the part that its users saw all day every day, and interacted with, and which made Macs desirable.

Not just the front-end of programs: this extended to how to install new programs, how to add drivers or other system components, how to add fonts; how to connect to printers; how to make or break drive connections to other machines; how to connect new drives, and how to remove them. All the daily tasks of running a computer.

But UNIX people, with their gods-awful UI, didn't care about this then and they don't care about it now. UNIX UIs are better than they were but they are still very poor.

The real problem is that all the visionary innovators got old and retired and their replacements don't have the overall vision and don't really understand how stuff works, so they randomly tweak things without understanding.

So Mac OS X's UI was never as good as Classic's, and it's been getting worse and worse for 10-15Y. Read John Siracusa's excellent in-depth reviews of Mac OS X on Ars Technica for details. The generally accepted high point was Snow Leopard, 10.6, and it's been downhill since.

Microsoft never had much of the plot, but what they had hit a high point around 1996-1996 and it's been downhill since. Now, as in the last decade, Windows is a UI train wreck.

But still people bang on about largely irrelevant behind-the-scenes stuff, not understanding that it's the whole picture that matters, not just the UI but not just the backend either.

absolutely yes! depends on your model and use case .. workstation fans often have this reaction though. Please recall that performance is not one number. Someone/something has to write code in a language, invoke hardware well and efficiently, and return the results to a user or process. Drop-down menus meant that no way could the machine do math? hardly true.. Performance on benchmarks ? probably as the others say, you will never win like a horse race. Overall in the expanding world of digital signals, media and math ? yes.. the Motorola chips had access to RAM if you could get enough of it. RAM plus math gets you a lot of places. Virtual Memory is guaranteed RAM but at what cost? all things considered, yes the Motorola CPUs did bring something and it was a highly competitive time.

edit right, add to that "digital audio signal processing" .. Virtual Memory paging was horribly obvious for Digital Audio, and that means stereo audio albums and digital audio soundtracks for movies, which was (and is) Big Business. Lots of hard math problems for geeks, lots of sales for business types.

My PC from 1987 was competitive with any workstation of the time but a lot cheaper. A 386DX-25 with 16MB RAM, a TMS34010 GPU and ESDI disks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_Graphics_Arc... !

Mine predated the TIGA standard, it is a NEC card. I ported GNU binutils to it then wrote some 34010 assembler functions for X11 to call to do basic 2D graphics operations.

It really was not.

You were kidding yourself then and you still are.

The year after that I bought an Acorn Archimedes A310. 8MHz ARM2. It was 4x faster in raw single-threaded integer computation than the top-end 80386DX 25MHz with L1 cache that IBM sold, and that was a $10,000 PC.

It was about 10x quicker than your 16MHz machine... and it cost £800.

Which version of UNIX did your A310 run?

It didn't, and I don't see the relevance.

The point was not the OS, it was the performance, wasn't it?

The point was the OS, that is what let you run workstation software of the time.

Being able to add a lot (for the time) of RAM was important too, your A310 doesn't seem to be able to have 16MB.

EDIT: This is a thread about UNIX.

I see. I never considered that especially important then, and I don't now, but OK then. In that case, I submit the Acorn R140 workstation running RISC iX.

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/3639/Acorn-R140/

RISC iX is broadly BSD 4.3:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX

A contemporary news story:

https://techmonitor.ai/technology/acorn_fleshes_out_its_unix...

Here is what BYTE thought of the successor model, the R260:

https://vintagecomputers.sdfeu.org/mags/byte/Acorn_R260_revi...

Not really workstation-class graphics.

They were. The close integration of a fast RISC chip and a framebuffer meant astonishingly good graphics performance for the late 1980s. Bear in mind, this was before VESA local bus existed, before NeXTstep, anything like that.

With a 4 MIPS CPU in 1987, you didn't need a dedicated GPU for blazingly-fast graphics.

This interactive graphics demo was supplied on a floppy with the machine. You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFwpsb75omg

Realtime 3D shaded graphics in 256 colours, with no hardware assistance? I'd rate that as workstation class, certainly.

This is 2 years before the first SPARCstation, which shipped with a monochrome framebuffer as I recall.

The R140 had 1152x900 mono but could display 4096 colours at VGA resolution.

http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Brochu...

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