Since we're sharing, I have fond memories of my using my the Sun thin clients at university. They were slow to start up and use for the most part, but once you got to the terminal... it was great.
Being a hacker-type, I did everything with it.
Email? Forget waiting for some bloated email client, I'm using pine.
Want some html on my personal page? Use vi.
I think they didn't take away my access for years after college, and I would sometimes login and poke around just for fun.
I do blame them, along with the rise of Java and the awful gui toolkit motif for convincing me to drop out of computer science and switch to Computational Math for my bachelors degree. I was so frustrated that our grades were dependent on learning something that I saw as completely worthless in light of the dotcom boom happening at the time. I wanted them to teach us web technologies, or at least some good system code, but all I got was broken x11 and awful performance.
I used a machine that had 8MB of RAM and a huge b&w monitor. One day I found out it would crash if your process forked more than 127 times. These things were so cool at the time but are nothing compared to a Raspberry Pi.
It's absolutely crazy to realize that even a Pi 400 running from MicroSD would smoke classic workstations of yesteryear, and yet by today's standards it's slow.
People used to joke that EMACS was an acronym for "Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping", just to give you an idea of how constrained memory was in those days.
Even the computers we think about as the first "PCs", the IBM 5150, shipped with 16 or 64kb of main memory. They were much closer to machines like the Apple II or the Commodore 64 than most people realize.
thegagne · · focus · HN ↗
Being a hacker-type, I did everything with it.
Email? Forget waiting for some bloated email client, I'm using pine.
Want some html on my personal page? Use vi.
I think they didn't take away my access for years after college, and I would sometimes login and poke around just for fun.
I do blame them, along with the rise of Java and the awful gui toolkit motif for convincing me to drop out of computer science and switch to Computational Math for my bachelors degree. I was so frustrated that our grades were dependent on learning something that I saw as completely worthless in light of the dotcom boom happening at the time. I wanted them to teach us web technologies, or at least some good system code, but all I got was broken x11 and awful performance.
forinti · · focus · HN ↗
flyinghamster · · focus · HN ↗
cduzz · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=33.%20LinuxCard" rel="nofollow">https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=33.%20LinuxCard
jandrese · · focus · HN ↗
Even the computers we think about as the first "PCs", the IBM 5150, shipped with 16 or 64kb of main memory. They were much closer to machines like the Apple II or the Commodore 64 than most people realize.
k310 · · focus · HN ↗
105 mb disks meant (almost) everything was NFS mounted, and NFS did a great job.
But to your point, with 8 megs, Emacs Makes A Computer Slow.
And there was no budget for upgrades to anything.