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by mc32 40 days ago
No bloat was good! Snappy responsiveness on early CPUs.
1 comments

Even xterm on a sun sparcstation running openlook was sluggish at the time. cde made it hopeless.
Heh, I still remember how, as undergrads, we thought we all wanted those "pizza box" workstations that grad student were using.

But when I was assigned an Ultra (1?) workstation at my first full-time job, I found that it was a better user and development experience to ignore it and use Linux on my Dell notebook, which I think was a Pentium MMX running somewhere around 200 MHz.

Relevant:

"Trust Me, You Want SunOS 4.1.4 on Your Older Sun Boxes"

(May 4, 2026)

https://oldsilicon.com/technologies/sunos-414-older-sun-boxe...

Yeah some of them just ran bad even on fully speced systems. The vision of the software was far beyond the hardware for a long while.
The network is the computer.