Of course a Unix workstation was twice as fast as a PC and cost twice as much, but it becomes pointless when most of the time it’s bored to death waiting for me to move the mouse.
(Though personally not at all a fan of most of the Unix paradigm, for me it’s a vastly superior experience to Windows. But I can’t deny that that is not the case for most people)
fun fact - there were no undergraduate courses in computer science at that time; master's level and up .. you have to be trained to use those workstations, even for five minutes, AND the oversight of an admin with security.
Mac? get one, fire it up, make Mac Paint pictures. The network IS NOT the computer, thankyouverymuch
Perhaps this was regional. I was enrolled in undergraduate Computer Science courses at this time, and it was at a pretty low-end state university.
I know my (non US) University have had undergrad courses since 1970.
It could be rephrased as “done is better than perfect”. I would love to have a high-end workstation based on exotic hardware with ridiculously fast storage, but an average home PC is probably enough for my development work and, when it’s not, I can acknowledge it is so because the software is much more bloated than it should be.
Well the Sun-1 definitely started there, no question (I don’t remember the Daisy or Apollo hardware). HP definitely never did and Sun (and SGI et al) all went down the custom hardware rabbit hole.
By the time they tried to hop onto the PC hardware train it was too late. None of those companies survive in any meaningful way.
BTW if you catch this in time to edit: you might want to put a hyphen between “co” and “design” because you didn’t mean signing code.
The Lisa deserved better.
Intel eroded that speed delta pretty quickly too. The other chip makers were crushed by Intel's billions of R&D spending.
That wasn't enough to overcome market positioning.
