I have a pretty ancient (on the scale of computing industry) piece of equipment occupying a portion of my desk - a 12 year old SGI O2 workstation. And you know what, so far I have no plans to get rid of it. I still think that it is probably one of the best (if not the best) workstation ever made - it is beautiful to look and the technology inside is still pretty impressive even by today's standards. The specs on this piece of machinery are pretty humbling - 180Mhz MIPS processor, 128MB of RAM and a 36GB hard drive. And you know what, I still use this workstation pretty much every day. It is no speed daemon by any means, so for me it is mostly reserved for non-intensive tasks like being a remote console for a bunch of other machines, testing scripts, and may be playing some mp3 files and internet radio using xmms. And mind you, even though I'm using it for these rather mundane and not very demanding tasks, the O2 is still able give the latest Mac or PC some run for the money with video editing using Adobe Premier and texture mapping tasks! Looking at this machine being 12 years old with measly specs still happily running and being quite useful for real work, it serves me as reminder just how bloated the desktop operating systems and PC's of today have become and how brilian Silicon Graphics' engineering was back in the day. I guess part of O2 usefulness comes from a pretty amazing ability of Irix (the Unix version developed by SGI and used on its computers) not to get bogged down with CPU resources stretched to the limit and still being able to present a responsive application. I still like the 4Dwm (the Irix window manager) more than pretty much any other windowing environment, perhaps with a single exception of Mac OS X - 4Dwm is blazingly fast and still very useful, well integrated desktop environment. Looking at the order of the magnitude more powerful laptop booted into Windows Vista, but still barely dragging its weight with 2.4GB Core Duo Intel processor and 1GB, I have absolutely nothing but contempt for the type of engineering Microsoft put into their flagship OS! What a phenomenal waste of resources. And all that for rather crappy looking eye-candy. I swear, if I was confronted with a choice of either using the 12 year old SGI O2 workstation or a PC preloaded with MS Vista, I would choose the SGI workstation every time. Well, I guess that would be a trick question - I would choose the O2 on the single merit that it runs Unix. I will be more productive on Unix even if it is running on ancient hardware...