2024-12-12

Hey town. It's been a good week. Lots of snow and Border Gateway Protocol.

On Usagi Electric's Discord they're rebuilding a little PDP11 out of left-over boards and a spare backplane and it reminded me of a conversation I had with a neighbour when I was a teenager.

Around 1998 I got hold of a DECstation 5000/240 workstation. This was old kit at this time but still pretty powerful. It had 128MiB of RAM, which was decent. It was 7 years old and being decommissioned by the National University of Ireland (Galway) where I think it had been used for some CAD package or physical modelling simulation. It had a 40MHz MIPS processor which, by this time, was pretty damned slow and Ultrix (the UNIX it ran) was already discontinued.

There was a period of time when, I think, DEC had all three "station" product lines running: VAXstation, DECStation and AlphaStation. So a lot of the docs and resources that I had access to made frequent reference to VAX, often mentioning that the DECStation was the successor to the VAX and source compatible. I'm probably recalling incorrectly but it's even possible that there were fat binaries (like Mach-O used) which included VAX and MIPS object code, and the runtime linker chose which to execute. Maybe not.

Anyway, this machine is a pizza-box Unix workstation. If you've ever seen the much more popular SPARCstation 5 or Ultra 5 then you're picturing the right kind of thing. By the end of their existence, VAXstations were a similar form factor. Really, not very far away from what a desktop PC is like.

Oh yeah, the conversation.

John, a neighbour, around the same age as my dad, worked for the Irish government in a department with "a VAX" although he was not a technical person himself. He simply would not believe me that this DECStation was equivalent (or more) to any VAX and that regardless, VAXen were available in the same form factor. He explained to me that a VAX is the size of an entire wardrobe.

He wasn't very unpleasant about it, but he wasn't ... that nice either, to be honest. (He has passed now, I don't want to be mean to his memory, generally he was a nice dude!). All these years later, I still think about this interaction.

There's a few things here: the rate of change of computing, obviously. A machine which was a cabinet before could be a desktop, within a few years. A few years after this it'd be the kind of computing you found in a wrist watch. Heck, even an AirTag, probably.

People of my generation and onwards take this for granted but if you weren't a "computer person" then I don't think you'd know it, at least, not in anything but an abstract way. There was probably no comparison for something shrinking from 1000 litres to 20 litres while also becoming 10 times as fast, before computers.

Another thing is the absolutely certainty that came from being an adult. I was a precocious whizz-kid, 15 years old at this point. We're used to that archetype from movies now: the signal that the young person knows more about technology than some older character does, but this was still the tail end of the period where computing was for adults.

Home computers were not like "real" computers, at this point. That's another divide that doesn't exist any more, too. The server in my basement is not very dissimilar to the servers that run the cloud. There's just a lot more of those.

UNIX workstations and even VMS VAXen and PDPs a few years earlier were simply not at all like what hobbyists used. We cut our teeth on little 8-bits running BASIC or, at best, a machine with 640KiB of RAM. That's not a real computer. My DECStation had 128MiB of RAM in 1991 (when it was new). What did a PC come with in 1991? 4MiB of RAM and almost certainly a 386SX (even though the 486 was out already).

Anyway. I try and not project the kind of misguided over-confidence that my neighbour did. I'm acutely aware of it in some places where I see culture moving fast. I don't know if there's a technological or societal shift that I'm missing out on that the youth of today get. Probably! But it doesn't feel like as big as "computers in the 90's" was. But maybe whatever it is just needs time.