debs3759 wrote on 2021-04-27, 02:29:

My first and only Linux experience was Slackware 1.0, loaded off about 60 floppies onto a 486. Never really got my head around it. That was when I was first getting into computers. Going to try a few more recent distros on a 775 system some time, but will probably never move away from Windows on my main PC.

Well things have moved on a bit since then for goodness sake....

Doh! Never would have guessed 😀

debs3759 wrote on 2021-04-27, 02:29:

My first and only Linux experience was Slackware 1.0, loaded off about 60 floppies onto a 486. Never really got my head around it. That was when I was first getting into computers. Going to try a few more recent distros on a 775 system some time, but will probably never move away from Windows on my main PC.

The same here. The first Slackware release was also my first exposure to Linux - writing the base, app, lib, xbase, etc floppy sets to 3.5" disks, wow that was tiresome.

Around the same time PC World put a copy of Slackware on their cover CD, shortly after I think I bought my first 'Infomagic Linux Toolbox' CD set... I still have those sets somewhere.

I tried Caldera for a while, before settling in to SuSE for most of the early 2000's, then moving to Debian around 2008, with Mint as my preferred distribution of the moment.

I've been running Linux ever since that first Slackware experience - for a while as a second OS, or on a second machine, but for the last 15 years or more as the primary (and now sole) OS.

In the same time period I used SunOS (and later Solaris) on Sparc whilst studying at university (and later had a job supporting the bigger enterprise Sparc kit), as well as getting interested in IRIX in my final year of uni. By that time I knew that unix was going to form a significant part of my career and for my final year project I wrote, from scratch, a multi-platform voice over IP application that worked on IRIX/mips, Linux/x86 and Unixware/x86. It was pretty nifty for the time. I've since gone on to run huge web server farms, high-performance-computing clusters and build fairly massive cloud virtualisation platforms for my employer.

It has definitely been a career builder for me.

My experience was similar. I started things off, in the UNIX world, when my mother took me with her, to work, and she put me in front of a Wang system running some flavor of UNIX System V, and I played Colossal Cave/Adventure. My first home *nix experience was with Linux, kernel 0.99, delivered via the SLS distribution, in 1992. I quickly migrated to Slackware, sometime in 1993. Both of these were installed, initially, on my 386DX-25, with 4MB of RAM. I later upgraded that system to a 486DX-25. I went off to college in the fall of 1994, and upgraded my Linux system to a Pentium 90. In 1996, I switched from Slackware to Red Hat Linux, with version 3.0.3.

All of that work to install (from floppy, downloaded at my high school!) clearly had an impact on me, as I became a UNIX systems administrator, for the US National Institutes of Health, in 1995. There, I was introduced to SPARCstations and SunOS and Solaris, which became my first professional love.

Since I now work for Red Hat, all this clearly had an impact. 😀

- Alex