For me, the workstation was always the more local, personalized door to the scalable compute environment. It could run more convenient or pretty tools, but was a compute environment for my own programming. The other kind of workstation environment, dedicated to CAD or other canned applications, was not very relevant to me. But, I did realize that market was eroding to Windows NT and therefore undermining the revenue streams of the Unix vendors.

I learned that my needs do not always align with the population at large, and I should be aware what is happening but not slavishly follow the common wisdom or marketing. I also learned about open source and free software and realized how costly the commercial software treadmill is, with constant obsolescence. I learned to see the open source world as a living process that I could contribute to and rely upon. I built my career in parallel with the rise of Linux, writing open source software. To this day, I go out of my way to use free and open source tools and treat commercial software like a hazardous material.

I started using Linux in college in the very early days around 1993. I quickly became a full-time Linux user, and have essentially never had a personal nor work computer with Windows nor Mac OS since then. They are both alien platforms to me. I have often had Windows in a VM for the occasional use of some proprietary program, but I feel like a fish out of water when I touch it.

In college, we had many flavors of Unix workstations and shared servers with terminal farms. We also had a local culture of BSD usage by the self-appointed CS hacker/gatekeepers, and they looked down on Linux. But, I found that my home PC with Linux was sufficient for most of my coursework and saved me from crunch times when labs were oversubscribed.

I also brought Linux with me to work. In 1996 I already knew a PC running Linux was a better "workstation" for me than the Unix machines my university habitually purchased. I can still remember a crappy Dell laptop with a Pentium MMX which outperformed a Sun Ultra in my real everyday work with compilers, insane autoconf+makefile build systems, etc. At the same time, I was very aware of the Linux HPC developments going on in the US national labs and anticipated the increase relevance of Linux.

My early job years included maintenance and porting of C based libraries to many Unix HPC platforms. I made sure it also worked on Linux. I tested Linux on my own hardware and also used remote resources in our building or at various US supercomputing centers for the other ports. I have now forgotten some of the OS names, but it included HPC variants from IBM, HP, SGI, Cray, etc. I even got mileage out of Linux on my personal DEC Multia (alpha) to do initial 64-bit porting before re-testing and finalizing on various remote platforms.

I was an early/beta user of so many frontiers of Linux. I learned that the community would rapidly adapt to new requirements as they appeared, and I found this very reliable tooling for my career. I was there for the early 2D graphics acceleration, the switch to SMP, the early 3D acceleration, and various changes to allow large storage, large files, and fast networking. Through work, I was also an early adopter/tester of qemu-kvm virtualization. Previously, VMware was one of the rare proprietary programs I used on Linux.