5 ms·

When I started college in the fall of 1993 we had hundreds of DECstations. A mix of 2100 black and white machines, 3100, and a few 5000 machines. That's where

When I started college in the fall of 1993 we had hundreds of DECstations. A mix of 2100 black and white machines, 3100, and a few 5000 machines. That's where I learned C/C++, ran Spice and various logic simulators. DEC had already announced the Alpha but the college decided to move to Sun and HP-UX which was probably a good decision because there was more software available for those platforms.

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
The 3100s could be sluggish running local apps but really shined when used as an X terminal with apps on an alpha server.
- __d 2y ago
  I had a 3100 on my desk for several years, with an LK201 keyboard and a 19" color monitor, running Ultrix 4.2/3/4 iirc. It was snappy enough running plain X11 or Athena (Xaw) applications, but Motif stuff slowed it down a bit. I had a tvtwm running a big virtual desktop, an Emacs with a bunch of frames, and a stack of Xterms. We had a couple of 5000/25's with the multimedia peripherals, but they weren't really worth it. IIRC, our group's server was a 5000/240 (?) Then we moved to Alphas (3000 AXP, then 4/255), then a Sun Ultra 10, and finally Linux PCs.
cbm-vic-20 2y ago
It was great to be able to walk up to any DECstation on campus, log in, and immediately get your desktop setup exactly the way you like it, without having to carry anything around with you all day. Displaying apps from remote Sun or the sweet new Alpha machines, too. Good times.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > walk up to any DECstation on campus, log in, and immediately get your desktop setup exactly the way you like it, without having to carry anything around with you all day. Just X over the network, or something fancier?
  - perbu 2y ago
    Just NFS, I assume. It doesn't take more.
    - tankenmate 2y ago
      and NIS/NIS+ if using NFS. being DecStations though it might have been using the whole DCE/RPC ecosystem (which was later adopted by MS for MSRPC and hence NTLM and SMB/CIFS).
      - lizknope 2y ago
        We had the whole DCE Project Athena setup at my school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena Everything was encrypted through Kerberos and AFS. We had a mix of workstations running DEC Ultrix, SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, IBM AIX, and Linux. The computing center compiled every GNU utility and put those in the PATH first so the environment was basically the same and you rarely had to worry about what type of machine you were on. We could ask a student who worked in the computing center to compile some new X11 window manager and they would and install it for all the different architectures and using AFS @sys string it would transparently link to the specific binary for that platform so you didn't need to modify your PATH We had Zephyr instant messaging and the .anyone file where you could put all your friends in a file and see who was logged in. We would send Zephyr messages on some broadcast groups and see who wanted to meet up for lunch. I made friends with people I didn't even know before through that. This was all from 1993-97 and then I got a job and it was like the stone age with NFS / NIS groups and chmod permissions. We are now creating stuff like zephyr with Slack
    - guenthert 2y ago
      Well any network filesystem really. AFS was popular at some larger sites.
      - lizknope 2y ago
        My school used AFS. It was great being able to use ACLs to give a specific student and no one else access to a directory in my account. Then we could make groups of students for group projects. Then I got a job in 1997 and it was back to traditional Unix groups where you need root or NIS admin access to create and modify groups. It's 2024 and I work at a company with 8,000 people and it still takes a few days to get multiple Unix group access for everything on a new project.

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago

The 3100s could be sluggish running local apps but really shined when used as an X terminal with apps on an alpha server.

__d 2y ago
I had a 3100 on my desk for several years, with an LK201 keyboard and a 19" color monitor, running Ultrix 4.2/3/4 iirc. It was snappy enough running plain X11 or Athena (Xaw) applications, but Motif stuff slowed it down a bit. I had a tvtwm running a big virtual desktop, an Emacs with a bunch of frames, and a stack of Xterms. We had a couple of 5000/25's with the multimedia peripherals, but they weren't really worth it. IIRC, our group's server was a 5000/240 (?) Then we moved to Alphas (3000 AXP, then 4/255), then a Sun Ultra 10, and finally Linux PCs.

cbm-vic-20 2y ago

It was great to be able to walk up to any DECstation on campus, log in, and immediately get your desktop setup exactly the way you like it, without having to carry anything around with you all day. Displaying apps from remote Sun or the sweet new Alpha machines, too. Good times.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> walk up to any DECstation on campus, log in, and immediately get your desktop setup exactly the way you like it, without having to carry anything around with you all day. Just X over the network, or something fancier?
- perbu 2y ago
  Just NFS, I assume. It doesn't take more.
  - tankenmate 2y ago
    and NIS/NIS+ if using NFS. being DecStations though it might have been using the whole DCE/RPC ecosystem (which was later adopted by MS for MSRPC and hence NTLM and SMB/CIFS).
    - lizknope 2y ago
      We had the whole DCE Project Athena setup at my school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena Everything was encrypted through Kerberos and AFS. We had a mix of workstations running DEC Ultrix, SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, IBM AIX, and Linux. The computing center compiled every GNU utility and put those in the PATH first so the environment was basically the same and you rarely had to worry about what type of machine you were on. We could ask a student who worked in the computing center to compile some new X11 window manager and they would and install it for all the different architectures and using AFS @sys string it would transparently link to the specific binary for that platform so you didn't need to modify your PATH We had Zephyr instant messaging and the .anyone file where you could put all your friends in a file and see who was logged in. We would send Zephyr messages on some broadcast groups and see who wanted to meet up for lunch. I made friends with people I didn't even know before through that. This was all from 1993-97 and then I got a job and it was like the stone age with NFS / NIS groups and chmod permissions. We are now creating stuff like zephyr with Slack
  - guenthert 2y ago
    Well any network filesystem really. AFS was popular at some larger sites.
    - lizknope 2y ago
      My school used AFS. It was great being able to use ACLs to give a specific student and no one else access to a directory in my account. Then we could make groups of students for group projects. Then I got a job in 1997 and it was back to traditional Unix groups where you need root or NIS admin access to create and modify groups. It's 2024 and I work at a company with 8,000 people and it still takes a few days to get multiple Unix group access for everything on a new project.