[atdrummond]

Absolutely. I remember drooling over SGI, NeXT, PowerStacks, even the BeOS SMP Hobbit box, all throughout the 90s. I wanted a RISC workstation, ideally a SMP one, so badly. Unfortunately it just want a realistic proposition.

Meanwhile my actual computer was either a Mac IIe or a 133 MHz Pentium Packard Bell beige box. In retrospect, this was probably a benefit - I really focused on learning how to do low level systems programming to make my code performant (I was really into demo scene).

Still, my interest in RISC and PowerPC did eventually pay off when my first startup company sold a million handheld PowerPC-based portable media players in China in the mid-2000s. I got to meet a lot of the original PowerPC engineers and team members and, as Freescale was our official partner, was able to tour the production facilities. My unhealthy obsession somehow eventually paid off - and now I can play with these machines in my free time.