3 ms·

Those machines may have been a pleasure to use. I even tried some of them: sparcs, sgi and a few IBM powers. I mostly agree that " they have been proprietary st

Those machines may have been a pleasure to use. I even tried some of them: sparcs, sgi and a few IBM powers. I mostly agree that " they have been proprietary stuff with proprietary apps which enabled some nice things, but lacked things I'd consider important". Nevertheless, by 1996, linux was mostly a toy and a portable SGI would definitely impress me. Although we had a SGI Fuel on our CG lab by early 2000's, linux pc's running compiz quickly stole their thunder.

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
/me mumbles: Yes, Yes. Linux, toy...but 386BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD... I think what I meant to say by lacking things I consider important was availability of software due to ecosystem/networking effects, common peripheral standards and so on. They all have been islands, and if you didn't had the application which could really use the graphics- and/or io-system you could use them as nice bases for your living room table and using not so crappy PCs instead. Imagine putting a plate of glass horizontally over a few of them :-) I mean, I understand the fascination. Sometimes when I'm reading about the Next Cube, 'modders' putting some Turbo-board into it, or the graphics thing, turning it into a truly unique variant which was never sold as such. The same for Next-/OpenStep on PA-RISC, using a superscpecial dithering only available on that hardware. Alas, silos useless in practice. So I mostly really don't care(anymore). Sorry ;-) Still nothing like a crossover between Hypercard and Visual-Basic performing well and clicking once, running everywhere while being effortlessly understandable.