It was an era of 80s software (msdos, etc) being run on 90s hardware, and the 90s hardware provided capabilities generations beyond what the software typically

It was an era of 80s software (msdos, etc) being run on 90s hardware, and the 90s hardware provided capabilities generations beyond what the software typically used. So you'd boot single task single user non-networked msdos to run a text mode eprom programmer, but that was done on early 90s hardware that could easily run multitasking, multiuser, networked GUI linux if you'd bother to install it. Meanwhile the uni got huge donations of hardware and software licenses from now legacy unix providers. The senior EE students would do VLSI design on sunos workstations (sunos was from the oldest versions of solaris pizza box era back when Sun made hardware). Well, if my 386 desktop is 50 times faster and four times the memory of the sunos workstation, why do they have all this fabulous OS and application software and I'm stuck on singletasking msdos or sometimes windows3.11 works and sometimes it doesn't? Why not do TCP/IP and fancy GUIs on linux using the same hardware?