I used an Apollo workstation in college for solid modeling. By then it was agonizingly slow. We hated those fuckers. They were probably 15 year old machines by then, though. Huge waste of a student's drinking time.
I used a vax as well. Vax had a copy on write filesystem that saved revisions which was pretty nice - far ahead of its time on that.
By then it was agonizingly slow. We hated those fuckers.
Just imagine one of those trying to render a modern web page. Assuming you could even give them a gig of RAM to do so, they'd probably take a day to render.
You know, you are absolutely right. More compute power is used on Indian tracking JavaScript than was used on designing a complicated mechanical system 30 years ago.
It is kind of amazing to look at all of the tech we use today and we aren't that much further ahead. Mostly we just have more stuff and faster stuff but not a whole lot of new stuff (aside from wifi). I watched videos of Apollo and Vax bootup sessions and it all looked awfully familiar.
I would love to see a Lisp Machine in person some day.
Check out gem desktop and the specs for the hardware it ran on.
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