[rdl]

I feel like I missed out on the personal computer marketplace of the 80s/90s -- I had a Mac in 1990, but I got VMS and UNIX shells slightly before, so the Mac was really just a terminal (and at one point, I actually replaced it with a dumb terminal to do dialup since the screen was bigger, and then a 386 running 386BSD.

MUDs, stuff like XTrek, and the general requirement that things be non-commercial (to fit within NSFnet guidelines) was really different from the small-computer marketplace happening at the same time. There were definitely commercial packages, but my only real contact with that kind of stuff was commercial OS and vendor support contracts for big machines I had shared accounts on (e.g. Sun support contracts, and some packages being harder to get than others).

There was a period in the mid to late 1990s when it was an NT vs. Linux (well, UNIX in general, but mostly Linux by then) question -- NT 3.51 and 4.0 became viable. But, before that, the high-end timeshare world and the small-computer world were totally separate.

[dredmorbius]

Similar to my experience. After having Uni shell access, I never understood the fuss of PCs. Tried out NT early on, was profoundly disappointed with its CLI tools, found Linux, never looked back.

The whole dial-up BBS era sort of passed me by -- I'd already had a taste of the Internet by then. In particular I missed the gopher / archie / veronica days. FTP -> HTTP for me.

[blantonl]

Don't forget the NT vs OS/2 wars.... that was far more brutal in those days.

[yuhong]

Ah, this MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics, and I do have bad words against MS for it. Remember "Microsoft Munchkins" for example?