I was a teenage intern at a very serious software engineering company, which was doing bespoke high-end in-circuit emulators, integrated into a full-lifecycle software engineering platform.

One time I wandered into the hardware engineering area, there was a customer box looking a bit like the later-model photos in the article, just sitting on an EE bench. (Though my vague memory is that it might've been something like Honeywell or Rockwell?)

As a teen, with so may things to learn about workstation networks and software engineering, and working professionally for the first time, and becoming an adult... It was awhile before I slowly learned who were the customers for all this platform the company developed. It was for people who make complex, critical systems -- mainly military, aerospace, and datacommunications. So it was just more overwhelming wonder: people use our stuff for aircraft and spacecraft?! So cool!

Later in my career, I have more context, to decide the kinds of things I want to work on. I'm also often involved when we start with the understanding of the customer, and the building cool stuff tends to follow that. Some of the AI toys recently elicit some of that earlier wow of everything being new and cool, but now knowing more context, and seeing through some of the current marketing noise.

Really happy to see this history lesson in any case, I had mostly forgotten about my experiences from the mid 90s.