Back in round 2 of my pursuit of an undergraduate degree at FAU in Boca Raton FL… I worked in one of the school’s computer support departments. There was an IT department for the operational side of the school like billing, scheduling, and other business use computers.
Then there was our department which provided everything else.
We had about 10 operations staff members who maintained the machines.
I recall having my first serious crush on hardware. The school made it’s first purchase of 27inch X-terminals from DEC. These were amazing looking devices. I don’t know if they were any more efficient but it was the ground floor.
The desktop was just a blank canvas with some context sensitive 3 button mouse clicks and things would happen. Ah the beginning of the META keys.
fast forward
I have my OpenBSD installation up and running. I’m hoping it’s going to be more reliable and featureful as I make more time to test… but it sure does feel like those days with the blank canvas. Think about it… what do we really need? Not much.