And even that was a fractured history. The Netscape to Mozilla release was heavily influenced by Netscape being bought by AOL followed by the Netscape team dumping a non functional browser (they ripped out a ton of code they didn’t own) on the open source world. People had to basically patch the stubs until it built and then rebuild from there. By the end, Mozilla barely resembled Netscape, but it did get the community finally building a serious open source option.
Too many OSS tools to really be able to mention them all. Thank you to so many GNU/Linus, OpenBSD, BSD*, and other developers!
I’ll mention these:
Without TeX I’d go insane writing technical and scientific documents. You’ve saved me thousands of hours of work!
Oh, and my current time waster game: Kohan: Immortal Sovreigns.
We’re in Germany. There’s always more bread.
Cheese and a slice of sausage is a breakfast. Bread optional.
15+… I was there, Gandalf… We had these kinds of setups 25+ years ago. How time flies.
Before that, it was often XTerm style systems. The local machine only booted an XServer and then connected to a central UNIX system. All programs ran on the UNIX server, and were rendered on the XTerm/XServer you were sitting at.
The original XServer systems were efficient enough to run over serial lines, not just Ethernet.
Another setup was to put multiple monitors/keyboards/mice on a single UNIX/Linux tower and have it launch multiple XServer sessions so you could have a single computer with up to six people sitting at it.
I also managed a Rembo lab for a bit. It used a PXE shim OS to get a menu from the Rembo server. From there, you could boot the main OS, or download a new hard drive image from the server. I would build new drive images and upload them to the server, then updating the lab would mean rebooting the computers and clicking a “grab latest” button. It actually worked very well for distributing OSes. We had both Linux and Windows images students could pull down.
Lab management at scale is a continual struggle to keep everything functional and patched.
It only happened in the last year, or even the last six months to truly be in effect. It was a huge position shift for the German government as part of their effort to increase skilled worker immigration and retention.