[geeks] The best things in the world

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Fri, 12 Sep 2008, Joshua Boyd wrote:

>> It depended upon where you were. If you were in a CS department at a
>> university, you heard about Linux. If you were out in the "real world",
>> you heard about Xenix, x86 UNIX, Coherent and BSD.
>
> I was in neither a college nor the real world.  I was in jr. high, and I
> suspect that was about where Jonathan was when he got turned onto
> UNIXish stuff.

I'd heard about Unix (Coherent and 386BSD, I think) through _Compute_
magazine and a couple of the shareware software catalogues I received.
That was probably 1992 or so.  I didn't lay hands (physically) on a real
Unix system until 1996, when I had an Indy plopped on my desk--probably
the ultimate geek toy in that day and age.

I was actually working for a tiny software firm, writing Unix software
before I'd graduated (or even gotten halfway through) high school.  I got
started young. :)

> I would check out books on unix and programming X11 from the library
> even though I didn't get to touch any such systems.

My school didn't have anything more exotic than a Macintosh LC (and,
later, a Power Macintosh 7100), but we[0] did have dial-in access to a
cluster[1] of Alpha systems running OSF/1, which is where it all got
started for me.  The idea of a machine that more than one person could use
that wasn't a faceless NetWare server really got me interested.

And, then, there was the first time I ran "whois".  "I can see the WORLD
from here!!"


[0] Erm, well, teachers did; students didn't. *whistles idly*
[1] MIT sense, not DEC.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
Elgin, TX         |                                   --Mahatma Gandhi
USA               |