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1 guest@cc 1969-12-31T17:00:00 [ImgOps] [iqdb]
File: indigo2[1].jpg (JPEG, 181.45 KB, 655x626)
After setting up a retro DOS PC and having a ton of fun with it, I've gained quite a bit of interest for other kinds of 90's computing, namely the non-x86 Unix workstations of yore that were monstrously fast and expensive back in the day. Anyone have experience with those things? Are they actually worthwhile to get and use, or is it one of those things where you play with it for a couple hours and just let it gather dust afterwards?

The MIPS-based SGI boxes are particularly interesting, but the pricing on those things seems rather silly at the moment.
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2 guest@cc 1969-12-31T17:00:00
Pricing has always been difficult, since the closest thing to an open platform is the IBM PC clone platform: everything else was even more proprietary than PCs already are.
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3 guest@cc 1969-12-31T17:00:00
I used a computer running OpenVMS a while ago. I had no idea what I was doing, I just read some documentation and when I logged out it said my session cost $2 or something.
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4 guest@cc 1969-12-31T17:00:00
OpenVMS is genuinely a very interesting operating system. You can use it for free here:
http://decuserve.org/
People should know more than Unix (and Windows/DOS)
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5 guest@cc 1969-12-31T17:00:00
ibm gosenhyaku
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6 guest@cc 1969-12-31T17:00:00
How monstrously fast is monstrously fast?
Would they still be able to keep up with the computers of this day?
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7 guest@cc 1969-12-31T17:00:00
>How monstrously fast is monstrously fast?
Compared to their IBM-compatible contemporaries in their heydays of the 80's and 90's, they had more CPU power, more memory (256 MB in 1993 was kind of a big deal) and more capable addons, for example SGI's massively powerful graphics options which made them really popular in Hollywood. As for concrete numbers, I have yet to find anything aside from generic synthetic benchmarks.
>Would they still be able to keep up with the computers of this day?
Not a chance. Sure, they're snappy enough to be used for general light computing even today with some caveats, but that's pretty much it, even a 10 year old Core2 system would devastate pretty much any of those things.

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