Yeah, I use a VME setup at work for data capture and it’s serviceable and reliable (reliable enough to still be working off a coax network cable, lol).

The one I had at home had a 60K-based motherboard with some custom roms and a load of serial ports … I never managed to get it to do anything useful, unfortunately

Yeah, BeOS looked, for about 5 minutes, like it might be the future!

And then it wasn’t :-(

lol, I never had anything like that at home (though I did end up with a 68K based VME system at one point). That AIX server was outgoing tech for SMEs even then, and I never worked for anywhere big enough to have anything Unix-y on it after that :-/

Still, it used to be cool how much oddly mixed hardware there used to be, whereas now there’s a slick VM solution for any size of business.

Oh fantastic! I was one of those young whipper-snappers with the technology of the future for OS installations - floppy disks. I can’t remember what sort of tape was being used during my “learning the value of backups the hard way” experience above, but they were chonky and took about 8 hours to parse each full one so I could pop home and eat between feeding them into the machine.

It all worked like a charm though, no lost data or anything :-)

I want to say my exposure was 5.something? On a PPC server used for a production management database. I liked SMIT from what I can remember (the documentation was good), but everything went well silky smooth once I managed to track down bash for it and basically automated half my job with basic scripts, lol

Also fun fact, I once took the server offline by tripping over a SCSI 3 cable to the raid array (while sorting out the bird’s nest of a comms room) and it took me 3 days to restore everything from backup.

That was my first steady IT job.

Yeah, the first time I saw CDE was doing AIX for PPC admin and I thought it was nice so went and got the student edition of Solaris for something like €7.50, lol

IIRC at the time CDE for Linux was available for about €50, which was a lot of money back then!

Unfortunately I had approximately zero apps for Solaris, so apart from playing with the OS I got no actual use out of it.

Nobody in here talking about BeOS, QDos, Geos (like windows for the C64!), AIX, or OS2 Warp? For shame!

QNX fucking rocked, I wish it had been useable as a day-to-day system. If I had to pick one it would be that sighs wistfully

Do you mean Workbench, or AmigaOS?

I do like the aesthetics of Workbench 3.9, the pixel art for the icons is very cute :-)

Yeah, that’s what I’m using too, mostly because I don’t want to spend time fiddling with computers these days

I still have a copy of Solaris for x86 somewhere, I liked it because it had a nice window manager before Linux and I hold onto the disk out of nostalgia

In Spain it’s a way of life. If I’m 10 minutes late for something I just call it Spanish On Time.

I’m gonna be straight with you, apart from the music the Rocky films were not the peak of cinema. I’m sorry, but it had to be said.

I’m not a bigot, but in my opinion the sliding scale between jam and marmalade is so fine that it’s not worth distinguishing between them, it should be a spectrum of preserves.

Yeah, the descriptions and lack of curation is really weird … browse games and oh look here’s 27 varieties of reversi and a driving game that crashes on launch.

If it were a curated list with enthusiastic and helpful descriptions it would make it more accessible to use. Get the mature and professional looking programs front and center.

Much as I hate to say it, it could do with a makeover from someone with a sense of marketing. (Excuse me for a second, I felt a little nauseous saying that).

sigh yes I remember 1.0 taking up a lot of my 160mb hard disk.

Things I remember: changing the command line font was mindblowing. I managed to get xeyes to run, but not a window manager, so I just had massive eyes following the cursor around. I compiled a lot of my really shoddy C code but had no idea what I was doing. The number of disks that Emacs needed felt disproportionate at 5 when MS Word 2.0 fitted on 3, and Doom fitted on 3 and a half.

It was all very exciting, and felt like you were “sticking it to the man” by not using ms-dos :-)

These days I just use computers as a tool, and as such I have Linux Mint on my home machine.

Not OP but, personally not having a modem at that time, I convinced a well-off friend that he should try it. Then I copied his disks.