Robert G. Brown
Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:13:53 -0700
On Wed, 9 Jul 2008, Toon Moene wrote:
Lombard, David N wrote:All were after. MCC dates from '91;Ah, that explains :-)As I bought a NeXT workstation in November '91 (at the tune of ~ $ 20,000) I had no need for a PC-type Unix-look-a-like.
You have my deep sympathies. I had to manage a stable of some ten NextStations, and while their GUI was lovely, I wanted to apply a blunt instrument to the inventor of "netinfo" as well as to the (probably same) joker who claimed that the NeXT could run on a standard Unix /etc model with NIS etc. I'd save a few good licks for the person who left all the blank commands in -- complete with their man pages -- and who wrote the NeXT versions but didn't bother making the binaries actually correspond to their man pages. Nice (if expensive) "Unix-like" personal systems; really dark side stuff to try to manage in a scalable way in a mixed Unix environment of mostly-Sun workstations.
Besides, the NeXT was good enough to start working on g77 ... It could even run our (then operational) weather forecasting model.
They also ran Mathematica beautifully. That was primarily why we got them -- they did a find MMA notebook, and we had a prof who was writing great notebooks to support some core graduate courses. But to do computations, for my $20K -- or even my $10K, as we got "great" prices -- I was all Sun. Or maybe a little bit SGI, as they had some nice (but much more expensive) MIPS based workstations that I ran a fair bit of code on. I'm a late finger -- I didn't start using linux much until 1994 or thereabouts -- some version of SLS first, and then transitioned to slackware on genuine floppies. At first I only ran it at home on 486s and then a couple of different cheap 586 clones, but in 1996 I bought some of the first dual Pentium Pro's and popped slackware on them with the 2.0.0 kernel and made them into a cluster. They weren't really bootable and stable until 2.0.5 or 2.0.6 or thereabouts -- the early SMP kernels were pretty disasterous and actually would do things like eat disks because of locking problems and some serious bugs in disk and network. So MCC's day came and went without my notice... and even SLS was a bit thin as I absolutely needed stuff like TeX and IIRC it didn't have it but slackware did. But it was long ago and I pitched my SLS and Slackware floppies (smiling face of bob and all) a few years ago, since floppies are obsolete. rgb -- Robert G. Brown Phone(cell): 1-919-280-8443 Duke University Physics Dept, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Web: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb Book of Lilith Website: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Lilith/Lilith.php Lulu Bookstore: http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=877977 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf