Comment Amiga - SIGGRAPH `89 (Score 1) 204
I was a senior in high school and wound up at SIGGRAPH in Boston in 1989. I was doing graphic design and programming for a small company that did medical imaging on the Amiga and we were in the Amiga pavilion. Nearby were some guys who had developed an X11 server and tools to build common X11 programs, with an optical three-button mouse. I think it was Dale Luck's company - I found a relevant announcement:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.amiga/ks3jiuCT5oQ
In 1992 I went to work for a company doing graphics software for the film industry. I was supposed to be writing Amiga software, but when I showed up they pointed to a $30K SGI 3000 system they had just bought and said "learn that". That began my crash course all things UNIX, X11, Motif, and gl. One of the cool things about SGIs was their gl api (the precursor to OpenGL) that integrated with the X server, so you could log into another SGI box and run 3D graphics programs with amazing speed remotely.