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On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 10:47:32AM -0400, Dan Ritter wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 10:14:10AM -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> > 
> > I recall back in the 90s when Unix vendors decided to halt workstation 
> > production.  ......
> 
> It's odd that he would say this just at the time when it becomes
> clear that ordinary people can enjoy using Linux desktops...

Hi Dan,
I think Jerry is referring to the "purpose designed and built"
UNIX workstations.  More powerful than the Win-tel-X86 systems
available at the time, based on "other silicon" (eg non-X86 based
CPU's, like MIPS, ALPHA, SUN, HP's PA-RISC etc..).

Those machines were not enough more powerful to make up for their,
(perhaps only perceived), greater cost over cheaper high end Win-tel
boxes which benefited from greater economies of scale.

Those Linux desktops you refer to are all (pretty much) running
on Win-tel hardware.  Linux Desktops mostly benefit from the
quasi-open-standard hardware scale economies that the Win-tel
marriage produced.

So you are right, more and more people are using nice cheap Linux
desktops, which are a different sort of animal than the UNIX
workstations of yore**. :-)



**Yore - The dark ages of computing... 0 CE to 1997 CE.  ;-) 

Jeff.  (A denizen of the dark ages of computing... )

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