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346 points BirAdam | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.576s | source
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tombert ◴[] No.39944744[source]
There's a few cases in the history of computers where it feels like the world just "chose wrong". One example is the Amiga; the Amiga really was better than anything Apple or Microsoft/IBM was doing at the time, but for market-force reasons that depress me, Commodore isn't the "Apple" of today.

Similarly, it feels like Silicon Graphics is a case where they really should have become more standard. Now, unlike Amiga, they were too expensive to catch on with regular consumers, but I feel like they should have become and stayed the "standard" for workstation computers.

Irix was a really cool OS, and 4Dwm was pretty nice to use and play with. It makes me sad that they beaten by Apple.

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1. bluedino ◴[] No.39944925[source]
They were destined for eventually dying like the rest of the high end UNIX workstation market. Linux and x86 got better and better every year.
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2. tombert ◴[] No.39944951[source]
Yeah, and OS X more or less mainstream-ized consumer UNIX as well. It gave you access to the UNIX tools in the command line if you wanted them, had a solid UNIX core, but was a lot cheaper than an SGI and also easy to use.