Nostalgia: At my first software development job in the mid 90s, the "cool" basement room with all of the smart/weird developers in it had a a mix of Sun SPARCs

Nostalgia: At my first software development job in the mid 90s, the "cool" basement room with all of the smart/weird developers in it had a a mix of Sun SPARCstation 10/20 and Sun Ultra 1 workstations. There was also this one weird SGI O2 they had just bought to port their software to the IRIX platform, but noone wanted really wanted to use it, because of IRIX. So I picked that workstation, just to be in that room. Smartest decision of my life - what I learned in there defined my career. The Irix Interactive Desktop (based on Motif) felt so incredibly responsive on the O2, compared to Motif/CDE on the Sun workstations. It was almost BeOS-like in that regard. It was the little touches that mattered. A random example: the CPU usage monitor updated at like 10-20 Hz, instead of like 1 Hz on the Sun workstations. Not that anyone really used CDE in normal work - other window managers were far more efficient. I ended up using http://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html http://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html on this O2.