On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 06:19, Michael Rasmussen <[email protected]> wrote: > A flip of Kirk's recent rant.
My story is quite similar: As a freshman in college in 1994, I was fresh off an internship with a SCO unix consulting agency; all of the employees had boats, worked 20-hour or less weeks, and billed fantastic amounts of money for doing minimal amounts of work. Banks were happy to pay. It left an awful taste in my mouth for what passed as "unix business" in the corporate world (they wore ties, I had to wear a wig to cover my "interesting" hairdo) and it left a copy of SCO in my pocket. I got my first machine capable of running linux that fall. And that's all it ever ran (besides some emulated dos and macOS). While I pursued a degree in computer science, I consistently learned more administering my machine and helping friends get linux installed (via floppy, natch) than I did in my computer science classes. I am fairly certain nobody else in the intro-to-CS class had to patch a pascal compiler written in C to get it to compile on their desktop =). I got a job as a work study in a department full of AIX machines and became manager of their computing services and moved them to linux (including some firsts on a campus with ~25,000 computers at the time - first linux cluster, first department to switch entirely to ssh, first spamassassin installation) during my 6 years on staff. I always say I learned more on the job than I did in class. That's not strictly true--back then I read the kernel mailing list as individual messages delivered to my mailbox and spent my spare time hacking on source code I could see, rather than the dust-gathering copy of SCO I would have had to guess about and purchase even the tininest updates for. What is definitely true is that I learned more from linux than I did from class. When I finally took the most intense upper level classes, OS and Architecture, I sailed through thanks to my familiarity with filesystems and cache/memory management from years of watching conversations on lkml and reading patches that people sent. I learned more about things like the inside of a network packet, DNS, and Sendmail from running the linux users' group on campus than I did in the Networks class I later paid to take. My career has spanned a lot of types of unix--I still consider IRIX to be quite pleasant and better suited for the kinds of things it tended to be used for (10 years ago) than linux. Solaris has its advantages. But linux is why I stuck with the field, where I learned most of what I know, and where I've had the most opportunities to do more than overcharge for underwork due to knowledge obscurity. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
