SpaceBanter.com - View Single Post - Towards the *fully* 3D-printed electric cars.

**Serg io[_2_]**

On 7/16/2017 8:51 AM, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
says...
The point is that CAD on minicomputers was very minimal. It was the
domain of the mainframe. Rubylith was the tool of choice for the
electronics industry.

I've worked on CAE software that's tightly integrated with CAD my entire
professional life. Back in about 1988 our CAD/CAE software still ran on
mainframes (IBM, DEC, and etc.) but the transition to Unix workstations
was in its infancy. Back then, PCs were "toys" that quite simply
couldn't handle professional level CAD/CAE software.

In the early 1990s Unix Workstations dominated for running CAD/CAE
software. A good SGI "box" would run you about $20k in early 1990s
dollars (about $33k today).

Today, you can comfortably run CAD/CAE software (at least the CAE
pre/post) on a sub $2k PC running Windows OS. But many customers will
go quite a bit over $2k with things like solid state drives and 64 GB or
more of RAM coupled with the best professional graphics card money can
buy (no, they're not quite the same as consumer/gaming cards). Still,
the most "decked out" PC workstation today will still cost a fraction of
what a Unix workstation used to cost in the early 1990s.

So again, we see yet another example of improving technologies driving
down costs in a market.

Jeff

key to that is the higher level of integration on the PC Chips, more
functions were pulled into fewer pieces of silicon.
and the maturing of PC software, it was quite unstable, Win 3.1 ? etc...
Win XP had good stability, not as good as Unix.

the Telcos ran Unix for decades, very reliable and hated PCs (unreliable)

Unix sort of split into Linux (low cost) and HP UNIX (high end, high
cost on high cost hardware) Which slowly ran HP into the ground.

I was offered a mainframe computer with 8 remote stations, (1990's) but
I had to haul it from a second story down, and in evaluating it, it had
less power than a PC (AT) at the time, and custom software, custom
software apps... I turned it down. Big Boat Anchor.