6 ms·

Not sure what's wrong with OPs account. Care to give examples? It roughly aligns with my experience during that time.

ngcc_hk 5y ago
So am I. Op seem ok.
justin66 5y ago
> Not sure what's wrong with OPs account. Pretty much everything. The OP made a number of statements about the various platforms' marketshare over time which were inaccurate if applied globally, but might have been accurate in a certain country, hence my question to them. All of this in service of an idea - that x86 hasn't been dominant for four decades - which is so absurdly counterfactual that it's silly to argue about. I mean, you guys know that these sales figures are public, right? Regarding the assertion that PCs were ever "quite rare in private usages." There are some pretty good charts of the various home computers' marketshare available here: https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/4/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/4/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/6/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/6/ It occurs to me after sharing those that one could look at those charts and assume all those IBM PCs were going to businesses (that's an AWFUL LOT of businesses!) but I don't have all day to spend on gathering this data... research game sales in the mid eighties if you have doubts about this! They were servicing a dying C64 and Apple II market, and a rapidly growing x86 market. x86 did not wait for nineties (how is this even an argument... jeez). I still have the Athlon XP 3200+ system I built, but AMD didn't deal any kind of "killing blow" with anything. That's extremely silly. AMD did an admirable job of forcing 64-bit adoption on the PC a bit sooner than Intel would have liked (and driving multicore!), but x86's domination in the marketplace did not have to wait for that. In terms of marketshare, ARM didn't matter much until it became an embedded standard. Regarding 68k, which the OP brought up for some reason, I offer this: https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/7/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/7/
- _ph_ 5y ago
  AMD did deliver the killing blow to Sun. At least in the company I worked by then, they were all firmly Sun for the large compute servers until the Opteron arrived. PCs were nice as desktop machines, but large servers with multiple CPUs and lots of gigabytes of RAM were not feasible on x86 until the arrival of the Opterons. Eventually they would replace all Sparc based compute servers.
  - justin66 5y ago
    I believe a lot of people had the experience your company had at that time. But... x86 (and Linux and Windows) started killing Unix and the other architectures a lot sooner than Opteron. At some point in the late nineties, SGI's workstation people pretty much curled up on the floor in the fetal position, moaning, "Windows NT, Windows NT." That spectacle was downright undignified, although the NT box they produced was impressive in its way. (They made some nice contributions to Linux nevertheless. Would that they had taken Linux even more seriously.) It says something about their outlook on the future of MIPS, as well as UNIX, that SGI designed their Visual Workstation using Pentium in an era when Windows NT on MIPS was still a thing. You can't quite say that AMD64 killed sun. Sun actually made some decent, if overpriced, Opteron stuff. Sun's demise is a fun thing to discuss because former Sun employees often have an interesting opinion about where Sun went wrong. I'm waiting for the guy who says something like "yeah, that was my department's fault. We blew it and the company failed." So far I haven't seen that.
  - hollerith 5y ago
    By the time the Opteron came out in 2003, Google was already a large company. My guess is they were already the largest search engine in the world -- and they ran their web crawler and search engine entirely on PCs. Hotmail was bought by Microsoft in 1997, then Microsoft promptly announced that the service would be switched over to Windows. Till then, according to Wikipedia [1], Hotmail ran some Sun boxes, but also a lot of FreeBSD, and I am almost certain that the FreeBSD was running on PCs. They were probably the largest email provider in the world in 1997. The Apache web server "was the most popular web server by Spring 1996 and stayed like that until the Summer of 2014" [2]. It ran and runs almost exclusively on Linux, which in turn ran and runs almost exclusively on x86. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com 2: https://blog.cloudware.bg/en/the-history-of-the-apache-http-server-how-it-all-came-together/ https://blog.cloudware.bg/en/the-history-of-the-apache-http-...

So am I. Op seem ok.

> Not sure what's wrong with OPs account. Pretty much everything. The OP made a number of statements about the various platforms' marketshare over time which were inaccurate if applied globally, but might have been accurate in a certain country, hence my question to them. All of this in service of an idea - that x86 hasn't been dominant for four decades - which is so absurdly counterfactual that it's silly to argue about. I mean, you guys know that these sales figures are public, right? Regarding the assertion that PCs were ever "quite rare in private usages." There are some pretty good charts of the various home computers' marketshare available here: https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/4/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/4/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/6/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/6/ It occurs to me after sharing those that one could look at those charts and assume all those IBM PCs were going to businesses (that's an AWFUL LOT of businesses!) but I don't have all day to spend on gathering this data... research game sales in the mid eighties if you have doubts about this! They were servicing a dying C64 and Apple II market, and a rapidly growing x86 market. x86 did not wait for nineties (how is this even an argument... jeez). I still have the Athlon XP 3200+ system I built, but AMD didn't deal any kind of "killing blow" with anything. That's extremely silly. AMD did an admirable job of forcing 64-bit adoption on the PC a bit sooner than Intel would have liked (and driving multicore!), but x86's domination in the marketplace did not have to wait for that. In terms of marketshare, ARM didn't matter much until it became an embedded standard. Regarding 68k, which the OP brought up for some reason, I offer this: https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/7/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/7/

_ph_ 5y ago
AMD did deliver the killing blow to Sun. At least in the company I worked by then, they were all firmly Sun for the large compute servers until the Opteron arrived. PCs were nice as desktop machines, but large servers with multiple CPUs and lots of gigabytes of RAM were not feasible on x86 until the arrival of the Opterons. Eventually they would replace all Sparc based compute servers.
- justin66 5y ago
  I believe a lot of people had the experience your company had at that time. But... x86 (and Linux and Windows) started killing Unix and the other architectures a lot sooner than Opteron. At some point in the late nineties, SGI's workstation people pretty much curled up on the floor in the fetal position, moaning, "Windows NT, Windows NT." That spectacle was downright undignified, although the NT box they produced was impressive in its way. (They made some nice contributions to Linux nevertheless. Would that they had taken Linux even more seriously.) It says something about their outlook on the future of MIPS, as well as UNIX, that SGI designed their Visual Workstation using Pentium in an era when Windows NT on MIPS was still a thing. You can't quite say that AMD64 killed sun. Sun actually made some decent, if overpriced, Opteron stuff. Sun's demise is a fun thing to discuss because former Sun employees often have an interesting opinion about where Sun went wrong. I'm waiting for the guy who says something like "yeah, that was my department's fault. We blew it and the company failed." So far I haven't seen that.
- hollerith 5y ago
  By the time the Opteron came out in 2003, Google was already a large company. My guess is they were already the largest search engine in the world -- and they ran their web crawler and search engine entirely on PCs. Hotmail was bought by Microsoft in 1997, then Microsoft promptly announced that the service would be switched over to Windows. Till then, according to Wikipedia [1], Hotmail ran some Sun boxes, but also a lot of FreeBSD, and I am almost certain that the FreeBSD was running on PCs. They were probably the largest email provider in the world in 1997. The Apache web server "was the most popular web server by Spring 1996 and stayed like that until the Summer of 2014" [2]. It ran and runs almost exclusively on Linux, which in turn ran and runs almost exclusively on x86. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com 2: https://blog.cloudware.bg/en/the-history-of-the-apache-http-server-how-it-all-came-together/ https://blog.cloudware.bg/en/the-history-of-the-apache-http-...