21 Jul
2020
21 Jul
'20
6:43 p.m.
On Tue, Jul 21, 2020 at 12:33:25PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
A big cost savings in having 20 diskless workstations
was that you didn't
need the 2-4gb of disks for each individual one, but instead could have one
copy of the 100MB-200MB of the core OS. When. X started getting libraries
out the wazoo with toolkit wars, it saved even more. IIRC, the Sun 3/50's
ethernet port was faster than its disk port, so your diskless workstation
could be faster than one with a disk (assuming the network wasn't
overloaded).
Huh, I'm not sure about the Sun 3/50 ethernet being faster than disk. It
is possible because diskless 3/50's worked fairly well. The similar
era Apollos were miserable without disk, I wanted nothing to do with
them but I was fine on a 3/50. Not great but it worked. They worked
better with 8MB of ram, 4 was tight.