Pete's irrational fear of SGI was:[geeks] Religion vs. Politics

[Peter L. Wargo]

On Thu, 13 Jun 2002, Tim H. wrote:

> Darn, now I don't fel as good about my 88, I want that 89!  Did they
> have to use external power? Or does nubus support that much?

SPARC chips were pretty low-power.  I think there was a slot restriction,
tho, as in you couldn't add much else besides a video card.

> man, 4xsparc in a MacII, that is a case of the tail wagging the dog.  

Well, since the byte-order is the same, one problem was solved.  Plus,
the software (somewhat like rocketshare from Radius) did a good job of
interleaving the boards.  Thankfully, the better NUBUS in the IIfx helped
as well.

> These things must have been very rare, and I am sure most of them were
> thrown out when somebody decided to clean up the old junk sitting in the
> lab closet for years.  Did Tek just do these type of things for Apple
> machines, or did they do it for other architectures also?  I guess I
> missed that whole side of Tektronix, I thought their only branch away
> from lab measurements was the phaser, and that I thought started as an
> o'scope printer.

They did all sorts of goodies, but Macs were their platform of choice, for
some odd reason.  They also had an early SCSI cluster controller that
tied together a bunch of IIx's into a 6-way system.

-Pete