> Please putany cool IRIX experiences you are having or had here where I can see 'em.

My mind was blown wn when I started University in 1993. We had rooms filled with brand new Indys. We had SUN boxes. We had been Solaris boxes. We had Snakes (HP 9000) running HP UX.

All as one heterogeneous system. You logged in to any workstation running X. Everything was seamless connected. One Login and everything just worked.

That new fangled Mosaic was then also primarily used to view scantily clad women. Serious students found serious information on Gopher. The geeks of the geeks wandering the MUDs.

Mosaic ran best (only?) on the SUN boxes. But through the power of X you could use it anywhere.

I saw the future. I thought that was how things was supposed to work. I have never experienced such a smooth and well running system ever since. So nostalgia hits hard with any mention of the old boxes.

Only thing I do not remember seeing at the time was IBM RS/6000 running AIX. And with full access to everything for a first year student. Glory days.

This was at DAIMI in Aarhus. First year students in Copenhagen at DIKU was envious as they had to share 1 HP workstation with around 20 terminals.

I too lament people trying to kill the X Window System off.

There is a fork now. Maybe they won't succeed!

That software is powerful and it makes things possible that should be possible but so often aren't!

My favorite X window accomplishment was setting 30 users up on a powerful CAD system running on a big Origin server. It handled all of them nicely, and the application, data and such all ran at local speed on that server. At the time, this was damn fast!

System Admin was easy too. I had a modem on that machine and would dial it up, fix the things from all over the country on a free Juno account! 2.5Kbytes per second on average and that was plenty!

So many great experiences on X. I used it hard.

Also up thread, I wrote about fully distributing a CAD app. One machine displaying for user, one managing windows, one serving fonts, on sharing the data files onto another one running the actual application reading data files from yet another one sharing those...

Crazy. Click an icon and 7 boxes all work together to get it done.

>>I saw the future. I thought that was how things was supposed to work. I have never experienced such a smooth and well running system ever since

Me too. Seeing the future was one of the more common sentiments expressed by people running IRIX, especially when there was enough gear available to exercise the better features.

In the later 90's we would break for 3D games with voice and video chat, yelling taunts and such asbif we were all in the same room.

Software manager was one of the better future features in my view. That thing was quite powerful!

Once, while doing the video render stunt I mention up thread, one machine ran out of space. Software manager [swmgr] paused, offered me the choice of changing what I wanted to install, the option to uninstall additional subsystems to free space, exit to a shell to do that manually, and or continue, all while another user was running the machine, busy doing CAD work, and without a reboot, or interrupting that user.

I specified more software to remove, swmgr finished up and it was go time! Easy Peasy.