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(Was Re: Demise of AT&T) List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list Archived-At: List-Archive: List-Help: List-Owner: List-Post: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: On Mon, May 19, 2025 at 4:28=E2=80=AFPM segaloco via TUHS w= rote: > On Monday, May 19th, 2025 at 12:45 PM, Dan Cross wrote= : > > On Mon, May 19, 2025 at 12:36=E2=80=AFPM Noel Chiappa jnc@mercury.lcs.m= it.edu wrote: > > > > [snip] > > > > It wasn't just AT&T, IBM & DEC that got run over by commodity DRAM = & > > > > CPU's, it was the entire Minicomputer Industry, effectively extinct= by > > > > 1995. > > > > > > Same thing for the work-station industry (with Sun being merely the m= ost > > > notable example). I have a tiny bit of second-hand personal knowldge = in this > > > area; my wife works for NASA, as a structural engineer, and they run = a lot of > > > large computerized mathematical models. In the 70's, they were using = CDC > > > 7600's; they moved along through various things as technology changed= (IIRC, > > > at one point they had SGI machines). These days, they seem to mostly = be using > > > high-end personal computers for this. > > > > > > Some specialized uses (various forms of CAD) I guess still use things= that > > > look like work-stations, but I expect they are stock personal compute= rs > > > with special I/O (very large displays, etc). > > > > > > So I guess now there are just supercomputers (themselves mostly built= out of > > > large numbers of commodity CPUs), and laptops. Well, there is also cl= oud > > > computing, which is huge, but that also just uses lots of commodity C= PUs. > > > > > > The CPU ISAs may be largely shared, but computing has bifurcated > > into two distinct camps: those machines intended for use in > > datacenters, and those intended for consumer use by end-users. > > > > CPUs intended for datacenters tend to be characterized by large > > caches, lower average clock speeds, wider IO and memory bandwidth. > > Those intended for consumer use tend to have high clock speeds, a bit > > less cache, and support for comparatively fewer IO devices/less > > memory. On the end-user side, you've got a further split between > > laptops/desktop machines and devices like phones, tablets, and so on. > > > > In both cases, the dominant IO buses used are PCIe and its variants > > (e.g., on the data center side you've got CXL), NVMe for storage is > > common in lots of places, everything supports Ethernet more or less > > (even WiFi uses the ethernet frame format), and so on. USB seems > > ubiquitous for peripherals on the end-user side. > > > > In short, these machines may be called "personal computers" and they > > may be PCs in the sense of being used primarily by one user, but > > contemporary data center machines have more in common with mainframes > > and high-end servers than the original PCs, and consumer machines are > > much closer architecturally to high end workstations than to > > yesteryear's PCs. > > > > My desktop machine is a Mac Studio with an ARM CPU; I call it a > > workstation and I think that's pretty accurate. At work, one of our > > EE's has a big x86 thing with some stupidly powerful graphics card > > that he uses to do board layout. It's a workstation in every > > recognizable sense, though it does happen to run Windows. > > This may be getting into the weeds a bit but don't forget industrial hard= ware, the stuff where you approach the blurry demarcation between CPU and M= CU. That's fair. I also ignored SBCs like the Raspberry Pi and its imitators and strictly embedded stuff. > This for me is always the third class when I'm discussing that sort of th= ing. Of course this also means "operating systems" closer to standalone ap= plications sitting on top of some microkernel like (se)L4, but you did have= VME-based workstations and UNIX versions specifically for VME systems. Fo= r me these walk a line between true workstations and minicomputers, but as = usual that is from the perspective of having not been there. For the recor= d, one of the canonical UNIX development environments from AT&T for WE32x00= stuff was a WE32100 and support chips thrown on a VME module running Syste= m V/VME. From what I know, VME is still quite common in industrial control= . How much UNIX and workalikes constitute the OS landscape in today's VME = ecosystem eludes me. My sense is that a lot of industrial hardware these days follows the same pattern as consumer devices, albeit often in a hardened chassis or with slightly different peripherals that allow them to work in environments with temperature extremes, poor airflow, and so on. I don't get the sense that VME is still the dominant factor that it once was in that space, but I'm not on a factory floor, either. Idly, I wonder how many industrial systems are built from, say, a Raspberry Pi compute module? Perhaps a more interesting third dimension would be safety-critical systems in automotive, aerospace, or medical applications. The PC in my doctor's office is just a small desktop thing running Windows and a bunch of software from EPIC, but the automagic blood pressure cuff with the nifty graphical display the nurse uses to take my vitals is something else entirely. > Either way, I feel like this is a class of computers that frequently flie= s under the radar, but if we're talking strictly consumer stuff, yeah VME v= ery quickly loses relevance. Interestingly, some of the earlier Sun machines were VME based. As I recall, if you popped the hood off of a "pizzabox" Sun 3/50, there was a VME SBC in there with some drive bays. In that regard, the SPARCstation 1 paper is worth reading as an evolutionary marker. - Dan C.