Ooooooh. I saw those when they were first announced right around the time of the AT&T breakup. Sweet machines for their time. Size matters and that definitely beats the Stride 440 m68k Micro with 25MB hard disk that I had as does mid year. I concede.
That box changed my life. I had started programming in C a few years before, but the Unix environment and I immediately got along like old buddies, and it's still my favorite OS.
Brother dayglored, that's exactly how I felt my first time on Unix. It was really spooky that it felt so *right*. The magic doesn't go away. I enjoy my Unix based Mac so much that the US government would criminalize it if they could.
It was my second computer that transformed my life. It was an AT&T 3B1 aka PC7300, mc68010 expanded to 2 1/2 MB ram and 50 MB hard disk. Spring 1987 when there was the fire sale at EOL.
All of the interesting software going through comp.unix.sources was generally BSD only. This required porting to SysV tty ioctls much of the time, among other things. An unbelievable learning experience. I had access to Unix source code from my job and I managed to get a working tcsh (without job control and some other features, of course), which I didn't use because I hate csh, but it was fun! I also got a vanilla SysV/R2 port of sendmail working. I could do pretty good software before then, but afterwards, I had confidence I could tackle anything ... and pretty much, I could.
Because it was an end-of-lifed system, there would never be any updates. strip(1) had a horrible bug. If you ran strip(1) on a binary that was already stripped, you got an error message and it deleted the binary. It was at that point that I decided that I never wanted a computer system that I couldn't make fixes to when required and I started contributing software back to what eventually became Linux.
Yep, funny you mention that -- in 1985 I wrote a computer-to-computer comms program that was a terminal with file I/O and special functions, sort of Kermit-on-steroids, and had to learn all about the SysV I/O for terminal and file control. Loved every minute of it. :)
> I had access to Unix source code...
Alas, although I could have (there was a nearby 3B5 that had full sources), I was not permitted to view them, because the company I was working for was developing a "Unix-like" industrial process control system from scratch and we had to have plausible deniability that we'd ever viewed the actual Unix sources.