Nick Andrew wrote:
On Fri, Apr 05, 2013 at 09:46:39PM +1100, Martin Visser wrote:
Well today pretty much marks 20 years since I've used Linux at home.
You're an early adopter :-)
So was my business partner. I had never heard of Linux in
1993. We were starting an ISP and I said NO to anything
by Mickeysoft. So the serach for am i386 Unix began. The
offerings were less than sub-average. I recall some commercial
Unixware (?) "thing-a-mess" was imsply horrible, bloated
and crashed as soon as you touched the keyboard. Sad.
Then bus partner downloaded something called Slackware. He
knew naught about Unix. After the 11 disc (?) install, up
came a prompt. I typed in "ls" and screamed Hallelujah!
He looked at me quizzically as I raved on about how this
looks like a Unix system.
We built the company on Linux and open source. At the time,
a mate was working at Ozemail which was using Mickeysoft
"servers" and staff were hired to hit the "OK" button
everytime a dialogue popped up on the desktop "servers",
which was quite often. Hilarious.
Whereas we installed Apache, got our web services up and running
and never looked back. The only negative at that time was
having to bring up a flakey NT box to support a customer who
wanted Lotus Notes online. Urgh. Curse. Grimace.
Wonderful memories indeed.
And lest we get to enamoured with what we have wrought, have
a read of the sometimes humourous and often accurate "Unix
Hater's Handbook." http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
It makes you realise that we've chosen the lesser of many
evils on operating systems.
cheers
rickw
p.s. it wasn't until apple adopted the unix platform in early
2000s that i even considered using a Mac. Now I'm using heaps
of open source on the Mac platform with great results. Amazingy,
the Max has not prevented me from getting anything up & running
(server wise) that I can do on Linux.
p.p.s as far as software quality, securitym safety and reliability
are concerned, we have a very long way to go, Linux included.
--
------------------------------------
Rick Welykochy || Vitendo Consulting
I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
-- Noel Coward
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