One experience I was lucky to have as a graduate student was bumping into a set of four old SGI Indy O2s running SGI Irix and driving an old (~£5m) MRI scanner.

One experience I was lucky to have as a graduate student was bumping into a set of four old SGI Indy O2s running SGI Irix and driving an old (~£5m) MRI scanner. As a child of the 80s, SGI Irix was the missing OS that I hadn't actually used: Mac-like in GUI but with solid unix underpinnings. It was -- in my mind, at least -- the "Mac OS 9" version of OS X.† Actually driving the things was a slightly different experience. The software was horrible to program in, old, klunky, but feature rich and very hackable. It made me question my gnu/BSD knowledge every time I typed, e.g. 'ps auxw' and got a usage statement; `vi` was ancient and definitely not vim running in a compatibility mode; and the `del` key issued kill (or maybe SIGHUP -- can't remember) signals. I learnt a lot. That machine was finally replaced when a professor nearby moved on, his former department didn't want his old machine, and I commandeered the department of physics's official (and excellent) Man and Van to help replace it with another microimaging system that I built using a mix of old hardware and open-source software [1], for which I am lucky enough to have lots of electronic schematics to go with and the relevant firmware. It's still going now, several years later. My old PI is still trying to get the money to replace it with a modern Bruker instrument -- which will be far less hackable, far more locked down, and come with a hardware DRM dongle; but doesn't require a postdoc (like me!) to (re)build and maintain. † Yes, I realise that was NeXT, but I've still never actually seen a NeXT machine in the flesh. I'd love to! [1] https://openvnmrj.org/ https://openvnmrj.org/