Cool, a nostalgia thread !
Does anyone here ever remember the good old days (mid-1990s) when all NUS students were given an account on leonis.nus.sg ? That was a shell account (csh, I think) running on Solaris. It was run in true-blue Unix fashion -- thousands of students would telnet to leonis from a dumb terminal (VT100 emulator) into csh and do their emailing using pine, or using text-mode IRC (ircii), download stuff with FTP, and surf using gopher and lynx. And you could chat up fellow users using talk and ytalk. You could finger them and find out what they were up to, where they were logged in from, etc. Hundreds of users all online at the same time on this single Unix server doing their own thing. Wonderful. This is called 'Community', man.
I never was a student at NUS but I spent much free time using an account borrowed from a good friend, learning UNIX commands and generally being busybody about what everyone else on the server was doing. (ps -ax)
I got my own Unix shell account at university (Aug 1994 -- ahh those were the good old days), again it was a Sun machine, running SunOS 4. It had three 50MHz processors and just 384Mb of memory, and served about 300 users simultaneously, on average. I got a "Unix for Dummies" book because I thought I would never need a reference book, I would not be getting too deep into Unix. ;-) How wrong I was ! I went crazy with the shell (it came with tcsh, and I've chosen this one ever since) and especially irc (it allowed me to keep in touch with my friends back home -- I was overseas).
I thought that Unix was so damned good, I gotta have it at home on my 486 PC (DOS6.22 + Win3.1 then). NCSA Mosaic was the graphical browser in use at that time, the fore-runner of Netscape and IE, and thanks to the hottest search engine at that time (altavista.com), I discovered this cool free Unix called FreeBSD. I downloaded FreeBSD 2.0.5 base files on 12x 1.44" floppy disks from the uni computer lab, and went home and installed it on my 486.
The rest is history...
I didn't get to hear about Linux until a few months later, and by then my 'loyalty' was firmly entrenched in the BSD world (SunOS is also BSD-based). The popular Linux flavour back then was 'Slackware' (any of you guys heard of it ??) and I did split my hard disk partition to try it out a couple of times -- didn't like it. Too slack, I guess ? haha.
By the time I left Uni, the era of the Unix shell account was coming to an end. The uni stopped giving us shell accounts, and as a consequence the student community became a colder and less friendly place. People dialled up from home with PPP to surf porn (or whatever), they never had to share a server and resources with other users. They never got the chance to log into a server and do a 'users' to find out if their best geek friend was online, and send him a friendly 'hello' using write(1). They never got the chance to discover how stable a server Unix is (my server uptime was usually in hundreds of days, and the CPU load usually 5+ at any time), instead they contended with hourly BSODs running a half-baked GUI (not even a complete OS) called Win95, and put up with the FUD from Redmond. Poor lost souls.
I fondly remember my early days with Unix. The good old days when all mail in my inbox was addressed to me. Spam wasn't heard of, the word wasn't even coined. So nostalgic I was, I even saved the "dmesg" output from my uni server (the SunOS 4 machine), and another Alpha machine that I had an account on. Maybe another time I'll tell you about the naughty things I did to circumvent the disk space quotas and the nasty evil sysop who deleted my files !!!