In a typical academic or r&d lab setting they were very hacker friendly networked setups, where people would share scripts, installed software, and media. You c

In a typical academic or r&d lab setting they were very hacker friendly networked setups, where people would share scripts, installed software, and media. You could access files in each other's home directories from any machine (controlled by file permissions), automate things with cron jobs, someone would be administering the IRC server, the servers and workstations would be the same OS so people would naturally graduate to running a IRC or usenet server for the local users etc. (Probably it could also be a much less fun scenario than a Mac, with power tripping sysadmins handicapping usage, non-technical users having problems or feeling excluded, etc)