[gxd]

My uni had these, as I mentioned in a reply elsewhere on the thread. I'm curious to know what kind of Serious Work people here saw back in the day.

I was a student so I had relatively rare access to the high end stuff... Most of my time was spent in cheap-ish sun terminals. Later on, as a last year student, I became cooler and got access to the RISC 6000s and started hanging out with the graduate students.

Most of the Serious Work I saw was email. There was some limited running of simulations and research software from other universities, but little that required a lot of processor power on an ongoing basis. I think these were generally more useful due to their native networking capabilities and software availability than their raw CPU power. In a sense, you had to have them because everybody else had one.

[tyingq]

CAD/CAM was a pretty common reason to have an early Sparc workstation.