USC had a couple big (by 1990's standards) time sharing Sun machines we used for CS and EE classes, which you could login to via SSH or VNC. Or you could use one of the few dozen Sun workstations in the lab which had the same software but ran locally, I guess.

The window manager was CDE by default, which sounds about as bad as fvwm2. You could run Gnome but I don't think most of the software worked very well with it (ePD! Cadence!)

Fortunately most CS projects could be developed locally on any Unix/Linux/OSX machine, then thrown up on the time sharing machine for testing.