Science Quote by Jamie Zawinski

A whole philosophy of computing is smuggled into that casual “Mostly.” Jamie Zawinski is talking like a practitioner, not a futurist: the O2 (a Silicon Graphics workstation) isn’t a sacred object, it’s a screen with a keyboard. The real work lives elsewhere. In one sentence he flips the prestige hierarchy of 1990s hardware on its head and treats a once-elite graphics machine as what we’d now call a thin client.

The intent is pragmatic, almost deflationary. Zawinski isn’t bragging about exotic kit; he’s describing a workflow where the local box is primarily responsible for pixels, while the applications run on a Linux host. That’s not just a technical choice, it’s a cultural tell. It signals an engineer’s allegiance to portability, tooling, and the gravitational pull Linux had as the sensible place to run “real” software, even when your desk held a machine built for high-end visualization.

The subtext is also about control. Remote display (think X11) lets you centralize computation, keep environments consistent, and treat hardware as replaceable. It’s an early, matter-of-fact preview of cloud-era assumptions: compute and interface can be decoupled; locality is optional; the “computer” is a network arrangement, not a beige box.

Context matters: X terminals were the original corporate thin clients, and X11 made this kind of remote GUI normal for Unix people long before “remote work” became a lifestyle brand. Zawinski’s line reads like a shrug, but it’s a quiet vote for networked pragmatism over machine fetishism.