Definitely a blast from the past. I haven't really been using a linux desktop the last 10 years.
Especially in college in the late 90s I remember using/trying a lot of these application.
Some of these like XBiff were standard things almost all of us setup as we configured out desktops. Mostly we were using FVWM but you had to basically build your own environment.
When I was in school the campus computers were basically a mix of Sun, IBM RS6000, and SGI, and the IT department had everything configured extremely nicely where you could log onto any machine and your desktop appeared and all your files were there and everything just kind of transparently worked as if you were always using the same computer, even though the machines were all different versions of Unix. For non programming work it just worked. For my CS stuff you would just have to recompile on the current arch you were on.
Gnome and KDE didn't appear till about my 3rd year.. I don't think any of them were really available on the school machines unless you built it yourself and did the work to configure your environment to use them. So we used a lot of these old school X11 programs.
I never had any money for a TV, game console, etc.. at that point and actually played some of these amateurish X11 games for fun. None of them were good enough to hold your attention very long but there were a lot of them to try. Some were really good for the time, like Netrek. The graphics were not amazing but the multiplayer gameplay was well ahead of it's time.
> Gnome and KDE didn't appear till about my 3rd year.. I don't think any of them were really available on the school machines unless you built it yourself and did the work to configure your environment to use them.
That brings back painful memories of getting Gnome (v1, perhaps) compiled and running properly; was it "the Gnu Network Object Model Environment" or similar?
Especially in college in the late 90s I remember using/trying a lot of these application.
Some of these like XBiff were standard things almost all of us setup as we configured out desktops. Mostly we were using FVWM but you had to basically build your own environment.
When I was in school the campus computers were basically a mix of Sun, IBM RS6000, and SGI, and the IT department had everything configured extremely nicely where you could log onto any machine and your desktop appeared and all your files were there and everything just kind of transparently worked as if you were always using the same computer, even though the machines were all different versions of Unix. For non programming work it just worked. For my CS stuff you would just have to recompile on the current arch you were on.
Gnome and KDE didn't appear till about my 3rd year.. I don't think any of them were really available on the school machines unless you built it yourself and did the work to configure your environment to use them. So we used a lot of these old school X11 programs.
I never had any money for a TV, game console, etc.. at that point and actually played some of these amateurish X11 games for fun. None of them were good enough to hold your attention very long but there were a lot of them to try. Some were really good for the time, like Netrek. The graphics were not amazing but the multiplayer gameplay was well ahead of it's time.