In October 1992 I was mostly programming in Fortran on a Dec VAX, writing scientific simulation and design software for electronic and optical components. About this time we bought some large CRT monitors, partly so that we could remotely read system documentation off CD's rather than a 1/4 mile round trip to look something up in the paper manuals in the IT office. We also spent > £20k on a PC with 20M memory for doing stand-alone modelling (not allowed to be connected to anything else).
In 1992 VAX/VMS from Digital Equipment Corporation was beginning to feel the hurt from various Unix systems that were becoming popular. In 1993, I worked at a US Army contract that still had MS-DOS and we had to do some creative accounting things to get them some systems that could run Windows 3.11.
There were still a bunch of proprietary systems like Apollo that had were used in a lot of engineering places. Unix came in two flavors, BSD System V and Berkeley. Linux hadn't happened yet but open source had made its presence known by all the utilities that ran under Unix with familiar names prefixed by a g- like gawk, gcc, gtar, etc. Before the GNU project, each vendor had their own C compiler that came with their version of Unix. The GNU utilities slowly made those obsolete as gcc became the standard C compiler.
