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Comment by aoki | Hacker News Reader

The early 90s were the era of (1) Pentium (2) PCI (3) multiplatform Windows NT. Most vendors switched to desktop/deskside designs based on PC bus and PC components, it would be more cost competitive (volume economics) and could run NT/Alpha, NT/MIPS, NT/PowerPC if the market went that way.

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In the end it was GNU/Linux under Intel the one which ate propietary Unix workstations. By late 90's (and even more in early 00's) MESA was getting good enough to surpass Irix machines.

Maybe at the bottom end. I was using SGI Onyx 2's in the post-production world all the way up to 2005. You couldn't run Inferno on a linux box running Mesa.

After 1999-2000 or so you could as DRI (hardware accelereted GL) was becoming a reality.

https://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/DriHistory/

I’m not saying that SGI weren’t involved with DRI, but Inferno cost about £1,000,000 a seat, and the suite was booked out at £1000 per hour. There really isn’t any comparison between a PC running DRI graphics and an Onyx 2 with 128 CPUs and 256 GB (yes, GB, even then) of RAM, running (programmable GPU) InfiniteReality2 graphics.

It’s a mountain compared to a molehill.

Windows NT was unlikely to be in the minds of many of the OEMs of the early 90s. It was marketed against UNIX, and the UNIX market was losing more and more users to the ever-more-powerful PCs running DOS and (usually) Windows 3, with a Novell setup if you wanted to share files and printers.

It really wasn't until NT 4 that Microsoft started pushing NT Workstation for general office use.

Depends how you define "early 90s" but Pentium wasn't released until March 1993 and the second one in October 1994 made more of an impression.

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