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points by stephenhuey 1 day ago | 0 comments

Makes me feel like we're back in the era of SGI workstations in the late 20th century! I got to play with a few of those in college.

[–] lakeviewterrace 1 day ago

Yes but they were heavy.

They were built like a brick shithouse and felt expensive. You always knew they belonged to someone else.

In other words you couldn't mistake them for an $800 Mac Mini.

Now try imagining a SGI workstation with 512GB of SOLDERED DOWN RAM. You can't because no one would have bought them.

[–] bigwheels 1 day ago

To be fair, these are significantly larger than a Mac Mini. More like one of the old Macintosh Quadras or Performas.

But your main point still stands.

[–] lakeviewterrace 1 day ago

Quadras and Performas were in full mini-tower or desktop configurations.

This thing looks like the ashtray you'd find next to it.

Anyway I'd get the same feeling every time I opened a Sun server. The metal work alone felt like fine industrial craftsmanship.

[–] localhost 1 day ago

still cheap compared to those things. lab down the hall in grad school had an onyx [1] with the fancy polarized shutter 3d glasses for playing what we called "chem tv" or semi-empirical small molecule docking experiments - that was something like $250k or so in the early 90s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Onyx