[rescue] Wanted: 486 desktop

[Derrik Walker v2.0]

On Monday, March 22, 2010, at 11:44PM, "der Mouse" <mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG> wrote:

>
>>> Life with Unix was so much more fun when you had to compile and
>>> install everything yourself.  No RPM or apt-get.  You were much
>>> closer to understanding the entire system.
>
>You can still run that way today, if you choose to.  I do; with very
>few exceptions (boot ROMs and embedded firmware are the only exceptions
>that come to mind), I compiled everything I run myself, that being one
>of the very few ways I can be certain I have the source to the code I'm
>running.
>

I do remember the days of compiling everything yourself.  I think I was a lot less productive back then ... 

Now, I'd rather spend the time working on mastering my C skills writing my own little programs.  Since I'm also a math geek, I like to write programs to do things like make the pascal triangle, and multiply the same way ancient Egyptians did ( which turns out to be an interesting problem to solve on a modern computer if you don't use lookup tables ).  Silly little junk like that.

Having said that, I also like running old software on new hardware, so I have a pretty good collection of interesting old source code ( mostly c, but some fortran ) that I like to try to get running on OS X or Linux.  Also, I have compiled a few things for OS X that aren't available in fink.

For example, a couple of years ago, I needed a file that was encrypted with crypt ( don't ask ), but I actually got crypt complied on OS X and was able to recover the file.

- Derrik