How I came to find Linux

[securitybreach]

Ian Murdock

 

Linux old timer. Debian founder. Sun alum. Salesforce ExactTarget exec.

 

How I came to find Linux

 

August 17, 2015

 

I saw my first Sun workstation in the winter of 1992, when I was an undergraduate at Purdue University. At the time, I was a student in the Krannert School of Management, and a childhood love of computers had just been reawakened by a mandatory computer programming course I had taken during the fall semester (we were given the choice between COBOL and FORTRAN—which even in 1992 seemed highly dated—and I had picked COBOL because it seemed the more “business” of the two).

 

Ten years or so earlier, my father, a professor of entomology at Purdue, had replaced his typewriter at work with an Apple II+. Thinking his nine-year-old son might get a kick out of it, he brought it home one weekend along with a Space Invaders-like game he had bought at the local ComputerLand. I spent hours on the computer that weekend. Before long, I was accompanying Dad to the lab at every opportunity so I could spend as much time on the computer as possible.

 

Being a nine-year-old boy, I was, predictably, attracted by the games at first, and my interest in games led to my first exposure to programming: computer magazines that included code listings of very simple games, which I would laboriously key in to the Apple—and, after hours of toil, hope that I hadn’t made a mistake (the Apple II, at least out of the box, utilized a simple line editor, so going back and making changes was very tedious, not to mention finding the errors in the first place).

 

Not long after, I met Lee Sudlow while hanging around the lab on weekends. Lee was one of Dad’s graduate students and had begun to use the Apple to assist in his experiments. Lee was always happy to explain what he was doing as I hovered over his shoulder watching, his helpfulness no doubt motivated—at least in part—by the fact that the snot-nosed nine-year-old scrutinizing his every move was his faculty advisor’s son. Oblivious to such things, I watched with fascination as he punched code into the Apple—code that he thought up himself, not code that he was reading from a computer magazine.

 

Between learning by example through studying the code in the magazines and Lee’s occasional tutelage, I was writing games and other simple programs before long, first in Applesoft BASIC and, later, in 6502 assembly language. To encourage my growing interest, Dad eventually bought an Apple IIe for home, and my love affair with the computer continued for several more years. However, as I entered my teenage years, the computer was gradually replaced with more pressing things, like baseball, music, and girls, and by the mid-1980s, the Apple was gathering dust in my bedroom closet alongside my collection of Hardy Boys novels and Star Wars action figures.

 

My obsession with the computer lay dormant for the next half-dozen years until it was fortuitously reactivated during that COBOL course in the fall of 1992. When the course ended, I naturally lost my account on the IBM 3090 mainframe where we did our assignments and lab work. Fortunately, as a student, I was entitled to a personal account on one of the university computing center’s machines, either the IBM or one of three Sequent Symmetry minicomputers running DYNIX, a variant of the UNIX operating system. A friend convinced me that UNIX was more interesting and had a brighter future than IBM’s VM/CMS, and I took his advice and applied for an account on one of the Sequent machines. The following week, I was the proud owner of an account on sage.cc, complete with the princely allocation of 500 kilobytes of disk storage. (Yes, I’m being sarcastic—500 kilobytes was a miserly sum, even for 1992. I eventually found ways to circumvent it.)....................

 

 

http://ianmurdock.com/post/how-i-came-to-find-linux/

[abarbarian]

Funnily enough in the same vein

 

Why did you start using Linux?

 

I only posted as 30% of the responders use Arch

 

Tosmarcel: "I was 15 and was really curious about this new concept called 'programming' and then I stumbled upon this Harvard course, CS50. They told users to install a Linux vm to use the command line. But then I asked myself: "Why doesn't windows have this command line?!". I googled 'linux' and Ubuntu was the top result -> Ended up installing Ubuntu and deleted the windows partition accidentally... It was really hard to adapt because I knew nothing about linux. Now I'm 16 and running arch linux, never looked back and I love it!"

 

Arch is really hard to install and use ! So hard in fact that a 15 year old novice can install and use it from zero knowledge. Don't you just love FUD

[securitybreach]

Arch is really hard to install and use ! So hard in fact that a 15 year old novice can install and use it from zero knowledge. Don't you just love FUD

 

Well it is might be a bit difficult if it were not for the wiki, which walks you through most operations.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

What's Linux?

[securitybreach]

What's Linux?

 

I think that is what those hackers and neckbeards run. I heard it was a type of spyware that sells your information to the russians

[ebrke]

Arch is really hard to install and use ! So hard in fact that a 15 year old novice can install and use it from zero knowledge. Don't you just love FUD

 

Well it is might be a bit difficult if it were not for the wiki, which walks you through most operations.

And quite honestly I think this particular 15-now-16-year-old is probably a bit smarter and more curious than your average teenager.

[saturnian]

Also kinda related, this weeks DistroWatch poll, "Why did you start using Linux/BSD?"

 

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20150824#poll

 

I didn't vote because I would have wanted to pick maybe six of the given choices.

[abarbarian]

How I came to find Linux byIan Murdock (2015)

 

]I never did get around to trying to connect the Linux-based X server now on my PC to the Sequent, which would have been painfully slow at 2400 baud—several thousand times slower than the speeds of today—anyway. Now I had my very own UNIX to explore right there on my desk. And explore I did, in a veritable UNIX crash course. Once I got over the thrill of being the “superuser,” the unspeakable power I had previously seen only behind plate glass, I became enraptured not so much by Linux itself as by the process in which it had been created—hundreds of people hacking away at their own little corner of the system and using the Internet to swap code, slowly but surely making the system better with each change—and set out to make my own contribution to the growing community, a new distribution called Debian that would be easier to use and more robust because it would be built and maintained collaboratively by its users, much like Linux.

 

Debian was 22 years old last week.[/s]

 

Darn it looks like this has already been posted.

Edited August 26, 2015 by abarbarian

[securitybreach]

How I came to find Linux byIan Murdock (2015)

 

]I never did get around to trying to connect the Linux-based X server now on my PC to the Sequent, which would have been painfully slow at 2400 baud—several thousand times slower than the speeds of today—anyway. Now I had my very own UNIX to explore right there on my desk. And explore I did, in a veritable UNIX crash course. Once I got over the thrill of being the “superuser,” the unspeakable power I had previously seen only behind plate glass, I became enraptured not so much by Linux itself as by the process in which it had been created—hundreds of people hacking away at their own little corner of the system and using the Internet to swap code, slowly but surely making the system better with each change—and set out to make my own contribution to the growing community, a new distribution called Debian that would be easier to use and more robust because it would be built and maintained collaboratively by its users, much like Linux.

 

Debian was 22 years old last week.[/s]

 

Darn it looks like this has already been posted.

 

Still a nice quote!!