Intuitively, I'm also extremely said that "workstations" aren't a thing anymore. That there are no professional, well-engineered, powerful Sun or SGI workstations anymore. In a sense, they even felt similar to sports cars: You drooled for them, often from a distance.
On the flip side, I don't miss exactly that: Not being able to afford such a thing, or even if you theoretically could, having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars (not even accounting for inflation yet).
Extremely powerful PCs are now available to nearly everyone who wants one, especially if you take into account that even a 10+ year old dumpster PC does more than almost all these past workstations in several regards.
We'd probably be lamenting the opposite if that wasn't the case. But yes, the shine and magic is mostly gone...
I visited people at SGI's animation unit, which was in what's now the Computer Museum. They were trying to sell a Windows NT machine with their GPU for about $12,000. It didn't work out.
I once saw a Softimage demo at SIGGRAPH where they had a PC hooked up to a full rack of compute servers for rendering, allowing them to run the good renderer at full frame rate. All x86/NT, not Unix. Someone commented "That's Steven Speilberg's PC."
There are no AI workstations or rendering workstations, because that's now done "in the cloud". People don't buy 128 processor ARM machines and run Linux on the desktop much.
Although a game developer's machine today, with maybe 128GB RAM and an NVidia 5080, is a pretty good supercomputer.
You can buy a 64-core 7985WX Threadripper Pro with Nvidia RTX6000 and 256GB RAM for $30k or so.
Upgrade to an A100 if you're in a hurry.
They're not unusual in commercial video and animation, machine learning, and general science/engineering.
TBH you could reasonably class the $4k M3Ultra Mac Studio as a low-end workstation-grade machine for some tasks.
“or as I like to call it, XNU/RISC”
These, as kits, are fun to assemble, fun then to play around with.
If you want to make your own: http://searle.x10host.com/zx80/zx80.html
My build log (including Gerbers based on Searle's foils): https://blog.qiqitori.com/2024/03/building-a-new-zx80/
If I ever retire and run a bar on the beach^w^w^w^w retro computer store, that’s what it’ll be called.
Same for machine functions: enable/disable certain features, write-protect some RAM areas, etc. Think old PC's turbo button, multiplied.
...but just now, our web server crashed on the Hacker News traffic. Of course...
The PDP-8 was hardware replicated many times. In the '80s it was a common final year project. There's a classic textbook that works through designing and implementing a clone of the PDP-8/I [1]. I've run into a number of threads over the years where hobbyists have done it with TTL to varying degrees of completeness.
The Apollo Guidance Computer was recreated by a hobbyist from the original designs using a modern logic family but gate-equivalent -- and I can't find it online anymore! Anyone know?
You can still build an original Apple II. [2] Being from the late 1970s there was no custom logic; it's straight TTL plus a 6502, and all the chips are still in production except for the ROMs and DRAM, which are easy enough to work around or find used.
[1] https://www.amazon.ca/Art-Digital-Design-Introduction-Top-Do...
[2] https://www.reactivemicro.com/product/apple-ii-plus-rev-7-rf...
In this class I & my lab partner designed and built a PDP-8 out of PALs on a wire wrapped board. And we loaded code from old paper tape sources as part of the testing. It was a fun class :)