Stop Microsoft
Miscellaneous => The Lounge => Topic started by: RudeCat7 on 11 November 2002, 06:57
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I must honestly say, that if it wasn't for the Wayne's World II movie, I probably would never have know about Unix.
....remember, Garth sees that chic with the Unix book.... :D
*meow*
[ November 11, 2002: Message edited by: Black & White Cat ]
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i think i gotta watch that movie again
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I was reading about Linux all over the Internet, in forums mainly.
Plus I just like to learn about things that are considered not mainstream.
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my brother uses linux off and on... and someone turned me on to www.fuckmicrosoft.com (http://www.fuckmicrosoft.com)
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i started using linux to become an leet h4x0r. and cause of hearing about unix from a mac using friend
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Started using it bacuse I wanted to try somthing different. And later because I found out how much better it is than M$ win and also because my hatred of M$ has exploded with the release of the worlds most useless OS upgrade, XP.
V
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the fact that a guy at school told me I should use it and he gave me then brand-fucking-new Slackware 3 or something. then a few years later, a different guy in High school told me to use it and he gave me then brand-fucking-new Red Hat 5 and I liked it.
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I was a mainframe programmer (MVS/TSO/VM). In our office we also had this old ATT 3B2 running ATT UNIX. It ran an old copy of Wordperfect for UNIX among other business related stuff (This would have been before Wordperfect had a DOS and Windows version). It sort of became my baby as far as administration goes. It was all ASCII terminal based (no graphics, just ASCII menus etc on around 20 ASCII terminals spread throughout the building).
About this time Windows 3.0 came out and we moved most of the office type stuff (Wordperfect etc) to Windows 3.0 with a Novell server. The 3B2 pretty much became a door stop at this point.
We were a development shop and all of our products were done on the mainframe. That is until we got our first cluster of IBM RS/6000 machines running AIX v3.2.x. I was converted from being an application programmer to being a systems programmer/administrator and was in charge of the new UNIX machines. Within a month I was in love and UNIX has always been by far my preference over any version of Windows even though we still used Windows for Office type of stuff. This was about 10-12 years ago.
Not too long after getting the RS/6000s, Linus started working on the Linux kernel. I got wind of it early on and started playing with Linux from the start. Within a year it was complete enough to use Linux/PCs in place of IBM Xterminals. This gave us graphical access to the RS/6000 cluster at a small price. In fact everyone had a PC that I set up to dual boot with Windows 3.0. The majority of the daily work by the department was done on RS/6000s through the Linux X terminals. If someone needed to use Wordperfect (and later Word) they would boot into Windows. It worked very well.
I did AIX/Linux for about 5 years, then Solaris/Linux/NT for about 6 years. Linux has grown into the coolest OS, but still not the best for heavy duty (and expensive/proprietary) engineering/scientific/data modeling apps requiring big hardware. Although that's not so much the case any more as Beowulf clusters are becoming so popular.
[ November 11, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]
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VoidMan, my resume beats your resume anyday of the year.
i got all that you said pluss ummmmmmm....LOOK UP THERE ITS AN ELEPHANT FLYING!!!
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Wow! Void main's resume is really impressive. Well, I first used Linux in 1998 when I read some articles on the Internet about alternative OSes.
At the time, I was using Winblows '95 and God this was an awful experience. Constant crashes, lockups and the rest I'm sure you all know about.
That's when I decided to buy myself a copy of SuSE Linux 6.3. I had a really hard time installing the SOB and at a point I was really desperate but day after day I started getting used to it and gradually started leaving the Windows-user mentality behind me. (http://smile.gif)
PS: Bazoukas! Pou eisai re file?! Steile mou kana e-mail na ta poume or PM me! (http://smile.gif)
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Well 6 or so years ago i had a "career day" at school where we go follow someone around at their job. Of course being the geek i was, i spent the day with a computer programmer. He used Solaris - and when i asked him what it was, he was like "yeah u may have heard of linux...." turns out my dad had a copy of slack for some unknown reason and had never used it. So of course i went right home and installed it. the rest, as they say, is history.
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My first exposure to *nix was in about 1990 when I was given an account on a MicroVAX running Ultrix. Not too bad back then. Then we went to SunOS5 which to me, as a user, didn't seem to be a whole lot different. I had the Sun account until just about a year ago, but went through some time using VMS, and eventually OpenVMS on an AlphaVAX. I have to admit, I am kind of fond of VMS even today.
About a year ago, we got a new IT director who felt that Windows was the only way to go and all the real stuff got replaced with Win2k servers and Novell. I could go on about the problems with that setup (which continues to this day), but when a friend of mine offered me an account on his Red Hat Linux server, I jumped at it. That was probably about 6 months ago or so. It was like coming home again, and I ended up copying all my network files to that server and more or less abandoning the ones provided by my employer. I use those for backup purposes and not much else.
Last month I finally put my first Linux desktop box together. There's a big difference between just using a *nix account and actually setting up and configuring your own computer. I used to think I knew a bit of Unix, but quickly found that I knew some basic commands, some vi, and not a whole lot else. Without this group, I'd probably still be trying to get my hd partitions set up :)
Now, although I'll probably keep my Win98 home computer as is, I do most stuff at home on my Linux desktop. I hope to be buying a much better machine and upgrading to RH 8 in another few weeks and may eventually even see about putting a Linux box in my office after I get a bit more experienced with it and make sure that OpenOffice can support all my office needs. I already know that it can do everything else I need.
Although my resume is nothing like void main's, I do a lot with computers at work. I use computers to control the physical plant of the college I work at. The server is a WinNT4 box that communicates with 25 MBC's in the field. They use Z8 chips to do their things. The language used is PPCL, which is a Basic-like programming language. I (and my students) write the PPCL and put a GUI front end on the command line interface so that even Windroids can pretend to use the system. I also use the system to "harvest" data from the system that gets dumped into spreadsheets and databases to assist in determining fuel costs, system efficiencies and stuff like that. Oh, I have my students turn a lot of the data into pretty little charts and graphs for those that like that stuff too.
Until recently, I also maintained the department's web page. I did that as long as I could telnet into my www directory, use vi to write HTML, and put up the web page. I enjoyed that, and I felt that my students learned something from it. Now we're supposed to use Dreamweaver or some such nonsense, and the pages are about a year out of date. I'm too old and stupid to learn that crap.
Computers have been a part of my job, albeit a small part, since the mid-80's. Unix first came into the picture over 10 years ago, and with any luck at all, Linux will make it fun again. Windows sure managed to squeeze the joy out of it.
Jim
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Actually my first exposure to UNIX was in a computer sci class. On the first couple days the prof gave us lectures, and started describing UNIX. At the end of class he asked us 'Do you understand why we will be using UNIX instead of DOS?'. I didn't really understand, but I didn't ask a question. All classwork was done on UNIX (Solaris), and all the university servers were also UNIX. The comps in the non CPS labs were about half mac and half win3.1.
V
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Around 1998, I was really into "on-line communities." Being not the most popular person around (it was the same time I moved into Houston. . .), I spent a lot of time on the computer, making various "on-line friends." One day, a met a guy that went by "haunted" in my starcraft clan (back then, I even played games, heh. . .) He was some college student. The clan, at the time, was becoming big and had a lot of fan submited art work. To upload all of it, "haunted" built an old computer that served as a server (I think it had 3gb of HD space, a p75 proc. . .) to upload all of that crap. Being the only guy that was intrested in it, he patoinetly explained everything to me. He told me a few stuff on linux, and gave me a telnet (not ssh) account. I logged in, and didn't really know what was happening - but I did mess around with it a lot. After a few hours of messing with commands like "top", I asked him how to get this crazy ass "linux." He pateintly explained to me I can either download it buy it - I was on 56k, so I bought it on-line. When I asked him what distro, he talked about Mandrake, Red-Hat and Caldera - he was running Caldera eServer. I narrowed it down to Caldera and Mandrake, and at the end, I bought Caldera for various reasons (He was running it, webmin, and the fact that it got rave reviews and a pac-man game at the installation (http://smile.gif) .) It was actually pretty odd - it didn't even have 1.x.x kernel or kde 1.x.x yet! Anyway, the rest is history!
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I have been around computers as long as I can remember. Used Orics and Sinclairs and Amstrads. On all of them I had the ability to program, and play around. Then I worked with a UNIX based system, and it was fast and stable (Windows today still can't do well the database stuff that system did then).
Then I used DOS and and Windows, I spent years missing those old systems, then finally snapped after having to use wizard oriented crap. I tell the OS what to do. If you use wizards you do not know what you are doing. And I am back in the *nix fold and will never ever go back on a personal level, and if certain plans come to fruition then I will soon be working *nix on a professional level.
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I tried WinLinux 2000 back in 1999. It was my first experience with linux. It was a small distro that booted from a dos based partition. Oh and it sucked pretty badly. KDE 1.x was so primitive, not only this, but I had no sound, no internet, and my cdrom wasnt detected. My first impression of linux was that it was pretty much useless. Fast forward a little bit and I decide to try out my first full linux distribution. Mandrake 7.2 was supposed to be very good for the newbie at linux, and this time my dual booted box actually had working sound and cdrom. However, I was still a windows user and had a winmodem, so I couldnt get on the internet, and Mandrake 7.2 went pretty much unused, unless I wanted to impress a geeky friend. Now lets move ahead to Oct. 2001.
The news was out, Microsoft Windows XP was supposed to be the next great thing. I was a windows user, so I fully intended on upgrading, until something soured my milk. PRODUCT ACTIVATION. I was able to deal with the constant crashing, the viruses, the huge amounts of other problems I had, but I am a computer technician. I love doing things concerning swapping my hardware, and when I found out that you had to have Microsoft permission to change your network interface card, I nearly wanted to kill them. I am not a software pirate, yet I have to suffer. My mind floated back to that Mandrake 7.2 I had installed on my box but never used. I upgraded to Mandrake 8.1 and I went to the local computer store and bought a hardware modem. At this point in time I started doing everything in linux. I took a class called "Linux Webserver" at the local college and I cleared Windows 98SE off of my hard drive forever.
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I heard something was being given out for free.
Sorry that it doesn't compare to some people's history but its the truth, of course over time i picked up a few more reasons to learn and use it.