if you had told college-aged me that I would be working on machines that surpassed the Sun pizza-boxen that we had in our college lab I'm not sure i would have believed you.
If you had told college-aged me that I would have a collection of programming languages available to me for free on said machines my mind would have boggled.
But that's what I have now. I have the workstation that I always dreamed I would have in my "dorm room".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation#/media/File:SPARCstation_1.jpg
@craigmaloney I actually bought a licence for a compiler when I was younger, which sound rather weird by today's standards.
In unrelated new I still have my two SPARCstation 5. They even run Solaris. It's a little sad how useless they became. I liked SPARC processors.
@craigmaloney we need to bring back the pizza box form factor
To think that at that age, I was happy with a 150 baud audio coupled modem and a dumb terminal!
@craigmaloney I actually had a SPARCstation 5 when I was that age. A few years later I found myself working for Sun.
@craigmaloney Same here. Hell, I've got four of them and two are laptops.
@craigmaloney but if you had told college-age me that I would *still* be flabbergasted—and not in a good way—by how long it takes to load a text editor/word processor to memory and open a document, I would have believed you.
Processor generations come and go, but bloat is eternal.
This is why I'm such a huge fan of Linux and GNU - I want everyone to have the things that I wanted when I was a youngster.