We had one of the two-processor BeBoxes at my uni computer club – it was a really cool machine to play around on, and at the time I was using it (1999) one of o

We had one of the two-processor BeBoxes at my uni computer club – it was a really cool machine to play around on, and at the time I was using it (1999) one of our few graphical terminals with a web browser, so in quite a bit of demand. We also had a NeXT tower, three SGI machines running IRIX, a Mac upon which someone had installed Mac OS X Server 1.0 (NeXT innards, UI looked like classic MacOS). I kind of miss the diversity of systems we had back then. In many ways we've gone forward – tinkering is much easier now with the preponderance of cheap, fast dev boards and systems like the Raspberry Pi, but it does feel like actual user-facing stuff is now largely locked down, without as much innovation and competition.