I used these at university too. modelling and animating using Softimage 3D in 1998.
Makes me feel very old!
I'm really eager to know how long ago and what kind of GIS software you used.
While ArcInfo was certainly supported on Irix I'd venture a guess and say Erdas Imagine for "heavy lifting" raster. Remote Sensing was such a fun class.
Agreed. Holy cow did I have fun in my remote sensing classes. I'll still remember learning about false color composites from landsat ETM+ data. The first time vegetation just popped out and I was hooked.
My guess is on Erdas Imagine too.
That or some more programmatic stuff like an OGR/GDAL pipeline.