The idea of a global setup was started at SEP in the early 1990s. Before that, a new student would typically hack together parts from other SEP students, struggling to get everything to work for them. The purpose of the global setup was to provide everyone the essential windows environment, Xdefaults, and shell environment that they needed to do their daily work. From this base, it was built to allow further customization and add-ons at the individuals discretion.