I've been searching this forum for answers to Linux questions, and found it to be very helpful. I finally decided to register, submit my first post and introduce myself.

I've been involved with computers since the early 1970s. My initial involvement was with mainframes, writing programs in Assembler, Fortran, Cobol and PL/I. At that time, a typical portable storage device was 7-3/8 in x 3-1/4 in and stored only 80 bytes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Punch-card-blue.jpg). Now, we have 15 mm x 11 mm micro SDHC cards that can store 16 gigabytes. Talk about progress of exponential proportions!

My first home computer in the late 1970s was a RadioShack TRS-80 with 4kB of memory, and a 1.78 MHz Z80 processor. Loading/saving programs and data on audio tape cassettes was a real pain. When I got my first IBM PC in 1981 with a floppy drive, 16 kB of memory, and a 4.77 MHz 8088 processor, I thought I died and went to heaven. Clearly, PCs have also come a long way since then.

After a bad experience with Unix on the mainframe back in the mid 1980s, I swore I'd never touch it again. However, I started to play around with Knoppix on my home PC in 2005, and around the same time, started working with Linux on mainframes at work. Now I work primarily on IBM System z10 mainframes with 64 quad-core PUs (processing units running at 4.4 GHz), 1.5 TB of memory, and petabytes of external storage. I create the infrastructure to support POC/benchmarks using multiple SLES or RHEL Linux guests running under the IBM z/VM operating system. These are usually connected to other IBM System z systems running the IBM z/OS operating system, or IBM System p (Power) systems running AIX, or IBM System x (Intel) blades running various versions of Windows or Linux. Since there are always new POC/benchmarks coming and going, it keeps things interesting.

Regards, Fred

I think it's awesome dinosaurs still walk the earth ;-p
Welcome to LQ, hope you enjoy it here.

Well like the person above I have use this board for information in the past and now have decided to join (sign up). I am some new to Linux/BSD However I have been enjoying learning the open source operating systems and some of the useful applications. I have just completed a trixbox deployment of my home phone system. trixbox is a telephone PBX system using asterisk as the PBX main app, with many other applications like FreePBX for a GUI through Apache and many other apps in one distro with Linux centOS as the OS. That was a lot of fun (Now only what to do with all those old 5 line phones I just removed)

Thanks for the welcome!

BTW, curious whether "dinosaurs" refers to mainframes, those who support them, or both? :-)

Regards, Fred