On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, will hill wrote: > How did the rest of you get it?
It was 1994, i'd just started college and kept hearing people whispering about this internet thing. So i got a VMS account, and learned about email and ftp. I'd already mastered DOS and Win3.1. About a month later, i discovered the www, and said cool i need to learn to do webpages. Everything said you need a Unix account. I said what the hell is Unix? it can't suck as much as VMS, haha. I soon found a SunOS lab on campus and spent many hours logged in, learning unix and perl. The friendly sysadmin told me i could run unix at home on my pc, for free. i just needed linux. i was like hell yea!!! so i downloaded about 25 slackware disks (at school, hehe) loaded it up on the pc at home and it wouldn't install. i had to spend $200 to upgrade my 486SX/25 from 4mb to 12mb memory. after that it was smoking!! i remember how cool it was to have apache, telnet, and sendmail running on my little pc! then the 2.0 kernel came out. i'd been running 1.2.8 and 1.2.13. i had to upgrade. this was before apt and rpm were everywhere, hehe... you had to compile libc, gcc, procps, binutils, ppp, ld, make and a whole load of other stuff from source before you could compile the kernel. it was a mess but if your system survived, you were a linux jedi master. i survived, hahaha. so yea i learned about free software from the internet. seemingly everything on the internet was free, there was no "e-commerce", and you got everything from ftp, usenet, gopher, and www. I knew it was free as in beer, but didn't realize how important the free speech part was until later.... probably when microsoft exploded onto the internet scene with win95 and i started paying attention to how they did business, how they would extend and embrace, and how well their software ran compared to free software. ray -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ray DeJean http://www.r-a-y.org Systems Engineer Southeastern Louisiana University IBM Certified Specialist AIX Administration, AIX Support =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
