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I studied computer science at Corunna University (Galicia, Spain) some ten years ago.

Unix systems were used for almost all subjects, although there were many PCs with DOS and Windows (which were also used to log into Unix servers).

I was an MS-DOS power user at that time and I had never seen Unix before, so it was quite shocking for me. You can imagine how it was the first time I logged into a Sun server and tried to open a text editor. I was told that the standard editors were VI and Emacs. Go figure.

Of course all students had a PC with DOS or Windows at home. Almost no one used Linux, the local LUG hadn't even been born yet and Debian didn't have apt-get (it was 1996).

However we had to use Unix in many of the subjects. We learnt programming in Pascal, and we were all using Turbo Pascal, but the exercises had to compile in the Sun Pascal compiler installed in a Solaris server.

As time passed we got used to Unix more and more. I think that by the second year Microsoft systems were not used in almost any subject except for a very few cases.

Some people still used DOS/Windows ports of some Unix compilers (GCC, Caml) but others dared to install their first Linux distributions.

I think it was around 1999 or 2000 when the first Linux server was put into production (it was Debian), and people started to use it a lot because they could use the same tools they had at home (besides that, the rest of the Unix servers were using very old versions of some programs).

By that time the PCs at the University were basically being used as X servers to open the apps we ran from the Unix servers.

I think that most students had dual boot in their PC and knew that Linux was the OS they had to use for work (although they kept Windows for gaming and the rest of their stuff).

I finished my degree shortly thereafter. A few years later almost all machines running DOS or Windows NT had been replaced by Ubuntu PCs.

And this is how it is now, as far as I know. People still do almost everything related to their studies using Linux. The main difference is that everything is much easier now.

A possible future history: http://mccd.udc.es/orihuela/epic/ols-master.html

That's what I thought of immediately as well.

Here's another link to it.

Why not?

There are people that like to learn languages to speak and express themselves in those languages with people from other places. That is the people that will learn portuguese, japanese, swedish or other languages with a few million speakers.

But then, there is also another bunch of people that just likes languages. I.e., knowing how they work, why they work like that ... and of course, creating new languages. That's what Tolkien did, that's what Marc Okrand did (he's the creator of Klingon), and that's what many people is doing. It has even a name, and it's conlanging (from CONstructed LANGuages). A wonderful introductory piece is at Boheme Magazine.

The official meeting place for conlangers is CONLANG, a mailing-list that has been going strong since 1991. And for links, you have conlanglinks, with many resources to know more about conlanging or about languages in general. The audience of CONLANG is very diverse, but I'd dare to say that most of them are either programmers or language-related people (teachers, linguists, etc.)

Conlanging is fun. Really :-) I'm no linguist, but conlanging is something very creative, and for me it's quite like a programming problem: you have some rules (that you create), and have to use them to express all the things that a language can express. And from the time that you express something in your own created tongue, you're hooked %-)

Anyway, I can understand that I'm quite weird and that many people consider this a loss of time. But hey, even Eric Raymond likes it. Basically, if you like RP games and science-fiction and have somewhat of a creative streak, you very well could like conlanging.

My own conlang is named Unahoban, and a quite incomplete and sometimes incoherent grammar is here.

Unicos runs on the Cray family of supercomputers such as the T90 and SV1 families of vector processing supercomputers (which use custom designed vector processors) or the T3E family of massively parallel supercomputers (which use DEC Alpha processors). SGI is spinning off Cray or something effectively similar to that. SGI won't be releasing any Unicos running computers in the future.

SGI also makes massively parallel computers, which if properly configured (read lots and lots of processors) are supercomputer class machines. These machines presently run, hold on to your hats, IRIX. These machines presently use MIPS processors. One of these machines is part of the ASCI contract (Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative) and is based on an Origin 2000 system.

Right now SGI is developing CC-NUMA computers (the same multiprocessing technology behind the Origin 2000 computers) using Intel IA-64 processors. Rather than attempting to port IRIX to an Intel processor or pretending that Windows NT will scale SGI is relying on Linux. Right now Linux can't do it, but SGI is working on improving that aspect of Linux. This is all stuff thats been posted to slashdot before. Here's a blurb to that effect.