That was my experience too, maybe a year or two after Charlie Cards came out (which was after I no longer lived there).
(I remember when tokens went up from 85¢ to $1.)
The lab I used most often ran Compaq Tru64 Unix (previously known as DEC OSF1) on machines with Alpha CPUs... but it was replaced summer 2002 (or maybe 2001) with machines running some Linux distro on Intel CPUs.
Also sometimes used a lab with Macs for testing browsers.
For what it's worth,I find the original stated rationale somewhat weak (that is, why not just sort them in the middle?), although I think there may have been more to it that I've forgotten.
Last 2 paragraphs of w3.org/TR/CSS1/#the-cascade are the best I know of the original rationale.
But turns out it's also good for clarity around lexically scoped features like @namespace (IIRC the CSS WG was discussing a new one last week or so).
Though, really, if you define the metro area as the districts in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chongq…), the areas are pretty close in population right now.
(The Chongqing municipality is really more like a province -- could have been "East Sichuan".)
I thought a bunch of the ideas were Incorporated into other APIs, but don't remember. I had hoped to investigate briefly today, bit didn't get the chance. Maybe tomorrow...
So... how many houses do kids in your neighborhood typically visit?
(Are you located to get lots of kids from other neighborhoods, or do kids there get lots of candy?)