I’m not sure it was a much considered cutting edge rather it was considered cost effective. 99.99% of office workers did not need this kind of workstation, windows systems were cheaper and became ubiquitous.
I mainly meant “to the general public” this (windows 98) was cutting edge.
Almost no one even at the time knew what SGI was. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s even apples share was tiny.
It just blew my mind then how horrible the experience of using windows was compared to Unix and that windows won.
I had a job in 2001 running a bunch of computers: 1/3 windows, 1/3 Unix and 1/3 Mac - os9 mostly. The Unix and Mac just worked.
The windows computers broke so often I set them all up to use SMB shares for user file storage. Since they were all the exact same dell systems and all had the same software on them anytime one broke I’d just boot a Linux CD and use “nc” and “dd” to rewrite a functioning disk image to the system in question and bring it right back up to usable. Then it was just a matter of logging in the right SMB shares and the user just thought I’d fixed their computer.
> Almost no one even at the time knew what SGI was. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s even apples share was tiny.
It wasn’t even very convenient to read e-mails. GUI e—mail programs were not up to the Eudora level on those machines. And heaven forbid you needing a spreadsheet.
This is funny because in the 90s I was at a similar position. I was at a university department where everybody had a Solaris 2.3 or 2.4 box as well as a PC that would dual boot into OS/2 or a 5MB MSDOS partition. Solaris, OS/2 and MSDOS would all mount the users' homedirectory from the SunOS 4.1.3 box, either via NFS or Samba.
People sadly did most of their work by booting into MSDOS and then loading Windows 3.1 from a shared readonly Sambashare that had Windows, Office and a ton of other programs ready to use. This "immutable" Windows installation worked surprisingly well as Windows no longer could destroy itself by existing and reconfiguring itself, and users could no longer run setup.exe for unneeded programs that would break everything else.
