broccoli the first, c.1989, was an IBM-RT, originally with a little 10-inch screen. That was where I first learned about X -- X10 at the time. broccoli the second, c.1992, was a NeXT slab, so I used NeXTstep for a while. Oddly, after I moved broccoli I over to make room for broccoli II, the RT would no longer boot. It knew its time was up... broccoli the third, c.1993, was a Sun Sparc Classic. broccoli III only ran Solaris 2.0, so it ended up serving as an X terminal while I ran all my real processes elsewhere. broccoli the fourth was a Sun IPC, which ran good ol' SunOS and allowed me to use it as my home base.
The next broccoli was supposed to be to a SparcStation 2. Unfortunately, broccoli IV was needed as a lab server machine before its replacement was available, so I was lent a Tektronix X terminal, broccoli the fifth. Due to beginning of semester craziness, the SS2 still wasn't available when I had to return broccoli V, so I was lent a different IPC as broccoli the sixth. Finally, my SS2 was freed up by assorted machine swapping, I received my long-awaited SparcStation 2, and broccoli VI made way for broccoli the seventh with a new larger monitor. broccoli VII was eventually expanded with a second monitor.
Similar to the broccoli IV/V changes, the next broccoli was scheduled to be a SparcStation 10, which was delayed. broccoli VII was needed to upgrade a network services machine (a poor IPC, which was never a broccoli), and all we had available was (aww) a Sun Ultra 2/2170, which became broccoli the eighth. With this broccoli I was forced to return to Solaris (now version 2.5.1), but by now it was much more livable. Concurrent with the change to Solaris I also had to switch from mwm to fvwm, and had also just changed from csh to bash...
The downgrade from the two-processor broccoli VIII to broccoli the ninth, a SparcStation 10, was a bit of a shock, but not an unexpected one.
In early 2000, broccoli IX was replaced by broccoli the tenth, an Ultra 10. There was some effort getting used to Solaris 2.7 and the CDE/OpenWindows dtlogin system, but how fast everything runs! And the nice graphics cards allow Netscape to co-exist with other programs without filling the entire color map.
In late 2004, broccoli X was no longer able to run a browser. Co-workers laughed at me using a Solaris box for my desktop. More and more mail came in with attachments and "antiword" didn't always cut it -- I never did get OpenOffice to run. I moved to an old PowerBook G4 (known internally as cauliflower). On Jan 10, 2005 I turned off broccoli X. Goodbye 128.59.39.153!
[broccoli bitmap by Sam]