> And, of course, "run Solaris" just killed the whole thing instantly, so instantly it baffles me how they didn't stop the project on day one. In 2004 nobody could use Linux except programmers— you struggled to run office suites on Linux— and Solaris was one step harder than Linux.<p>I dunno about this. My dad was a research chemist and when I was a kid I would occasionally go into the office and check out the computer. They were all using Unix workstations (Solaris I believe) and seemed to get their work done fine. There was Lotus Notes, there was NCSA Mosaic... all the things you do with your computer today, they did with Unix 25 years ago. My dad wasn't a programmer and neither were his lab-mates. That was just how computers were then. This was not 2004, though, this was like 1995. But I was 10 and figured it out with 10 minutes of screwing around on "take your kid to work day", so maybe it wasn't so complicated that no mere mortal could ever hope to compute in that environment.<p>I agree that office suites circa 2004 were bad. I used Linux all throughout high school and never liked Abiword or the competition (I guess OpenOffice might have been a thing back then). I learned LaTeX and used that. Looking back, I don't think I would have liked Microsoft Word, either. WYSIWYG was a big deal back then, but I didn't really care what I got. (I ended up tweaking LaTeX to double-space and use thin margins to look like Word, since teachers demanded it. I personally didn't care; whatever Knuth decided looked good, I was fine with.)<p>Using Unix or Linux back then was really liberating. I remember that if you wanted to learn C or C++ on DOS/Windows/Mac at the time, you had to spend hundreds of dollars on an IDE (Borland C++? Visual C++? I don't really remember.) Or you could just install Linux, and it was all free. Sure, Emacs had some warts, and wasn't really integrated with GCC... but if you were willing to push through, you could do your homework at home, while your classmates had to stay in the computer lab and do it.<p>I dunno, I don't think it was all that bad. We ended up using the "software runs on a server" model anyway, with web apps. You open Google Docs to type something and if your computer blows up, no worries, you can just keep working from another computer. Very much like the Sun smartcard-based system the author describes, just with more "material design" instead of "some UNIX geeks were excited they figured out how to draw shadows efficiently." What's old is new. Not much has REALLY changed.