Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

From what I remember in Hungary thirty-ish years ago: Professional AV was Commodore Amiga. DTP used Mac because of QuarkXPress. Professional design used SGI Indigo.

IBM PC was office and in this period it became the gaming machine. Even before Commodore went bankrupt, the Gravis Ultrasound and Wolfenstein 3D dethroned the Amiga. https://youtu.be/wsADJa-23Sg has an excellent explanation why Wolfenstein 3D couldn't be done on the Amiga. The GUS was key in moving the demoscene to the PC and while obviously that's extremely niche it literally demonstrated what the PC is capable of and had a huge effect on the game creators. The first Assembly was organized in 1992 by two Amiga groups and Future Crew but just one year the latter released Second Reality and the Amiga was no more.



GUS was also the start of Alsa https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Alsa-sound-3.html


Sorry for misremembering: it was SGI Indy not the Indigo.


And also important to note that the SGI machines were a factor more expensive again than the macs. If the macs were already nearly unfeasible in Eastern Europe the SGIs certainly would be.


And yet I saw more than a few in the early 3D / rendering business. Maybe they worked for Western VFX houses? I can't recall.

Price wise, I am not sure. There were cheaper Macs yes but looking at workstations https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_quadra/specs/mac_quad... https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?attachments/sgi-indy-introdu... pricing is comparable?


Oh yeah I'm sure because they were pretty much the only game in town for that.

But what I mean is: they were purely professional workstations. A Mac was something that a wealthy private person could have, easily. You wouldn't buy an Indy, they were over 20k$ or something. I was really referring to private use.

We had some at university but even those were donated. Though we were mainly a HP-UX shop.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: