Comment by jnwatson
8 hours ago
Some teenagers saved up money for a car. I saved up money for a PowerMac 7100. It cost me $3k, with a solid student discount.
I used it throughout college and beyond. I upgraded the RAM, the L2 cache. I even added one of the Sonnet G3 cards the article shows.
During its latter years, it only ran MkLinux.
Similar story here, but I must have been slightly behind cuz I had a 7200.
Was so stoked when MkLinux came out but quickly took sides in the micro-mono-kernel wars when ppclinux came out, must have been '95 or '96. I was probably the first person to boot the monokernel on a 7200, (iirc Mackerras had a 9k series), thus unlocking the challenge of reverse engineering the video hardware, and an early career in embedded sw.
This was the era when there were mac clones, somehow I or someone involved (Jeff Carr probably) got one and I got it housed in the wisconsin cs labs, doleing out accounts to random people who wanted to build packages on PPC. One of whom was Mark Abene. Truly different times, when a notorious hacker would call you up on the phone and ask for an account on your machine and "sure dude just don't break anything".
In the spirit of historical dives, Wisc still keeps my old fanpage up - the final comment there that it hasn't been updated since '98 is accurate!
https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~tesch/linux_info/