Reply 20 of 24, by CharlieFoxtrot
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douglar wrote on 2025-07-11, 03:37:Yes, the 8514a compatibles were > $2000 cards when they came out in the late 80’s. Your 386 20 could out perform like a $20,000 cad station! They lost much of their value when a 486-33 could out pace them for rendering, undesirable dinosaurs when S3 & Mach32 VLB cards could draw 10x faster, and forgotten relics by the time of PCI. Things moved fast back then.
This here is what is one of the most fascinating things with retro computing, the rise and fall of things. Like with these graphics accelerators that thrived for few years in professional space, computing history is filled with stuff where commodity stuff sooner or later manages to reach and ultimately surpasses these expensive special and focused solutions. Same thing happened with computers based on specialized chipsets (Amiga etc) and later companies like Sun, SGI and all the other Unix/RISC manufacturers found it increasingly difficult to compete with much cheaper and increasingly better performing commodity x86 PCs. And thus Unix WSs died almost overnight because of the huge performance leaps of PCs in the late 90s and early 2000s and where the bursting of dot com bubble worked as a perfect catalyst.
Then again, as years progressed and the variety of different and sometimes odd technological soulutions decreased, things tend to get increasingly more boring from the retro computing point of view, at least in my opinion.
