Oh, let's see... 1961 (still in high school), IBM tabulation equipment (programming with jumper wires on phenolic boards -- large, heavy boards). 1972 Honeywell GECOS mainframe, BASIC and FORTRAN. 1975-ish Cromemco Z-80 boxes running Cromemco's version of CP/M, later running Cromemco Cromix, a Z-80 multiuser multitasking Unix look- work alike, later Cromemco dual boot systems running Z-80 Cromix and Unix System 3 (on Motorola 68030 (with separate memory manager board). Still have one of those, still works (running Unix in 1MB of RAM on a 96MB disk, too).

Later 1988-ish, Motorola 68040 Unix System 3 (system administrator and software engineer).

1990-ish, Solaris (software engineer, data base designer and developer).

Bought a Dell box with Win98 and about 1997-ish (do not remember these dates), installed Slackware 3.x (I'm pretty sure) and dual-booted; Win98 rapidly got set aside and ultimately trashed altogether.

Series of Dells since, all Slackware, up to Slackware 64-bit 14.1 on my main work machine and lap top, Slackware 14.1 32-bit on two old Dell Dimension 8400 that are headless data base servers (one MariaDB, the other PolstgreSQL, like PostgreSQL more than MySQL/MariaDB).

Looked at Ubuntu, scrap that. Looked at a couple of others, scrapped those. It's really been Slackware-exclusive since the first install. I'm embarrassed to note that I have VirtualBox on my main work machine and -- rarely -- boot Win7 on it for work I just can't find in the Linux world.

Haven't looked back.

In the mid 90's I was using OS2 but needed a way to share a modem. I found diald and put it on an old machine running slackware. Fun! and a new world.

I was using Open Source at work (University, SPARC workstations) before Linux was bootable - there's an early version of a manual page I contributed dated 12/12/1992, and we were using various open source tools including emacs, RCS, other commmand line stuff - and then when Linux became useable enough I installed it on my home PC in May 1993.

I started working in an engineering lab circa 1996, and we used data acquisition software that ran in a Unix environment. I first saw GNU/Linux during this period when a co-worker introduced me to it. Later, in 2004, I installed my first dual-boot system, which was Suse 9.1 with Windows 2000.

I was taking a class on Windows NT security and the instructor gave me a copy of Red Hat Linux. I don't remember if it was 6 or 7, still have the disks somewhere. Since then I have used Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise, White Box, Debian, Knoppix, Damn Small, Suse, and a few others that were forgettable. Ubuntu has been my go to for a while, though I really need to suck it up and try Slackware.

Eric

I had undergone an Amdahl course "UTS for FE's" and was exploring UTS (Amdahl's Unix) on Mainframes.
A colleague introduced me to Minix. I did development on the Mainframe during the day and took the sources home on floppy and modified them to run under Minix on the PC.

I saw Linus' announcement of Linux in the Minix newsgroup and downloaded the first kernel, running it on a Toshiba laptop with 2 floppy drives. Before the ext filesystem, used Minix's bootlace and shoelace to get Linux booted and running off hard drives, OLVWM to get X running where modelines had to be worked out with a ruler to measure screen dimensions and a calculator plus some fiddling to get the display to fit.
The first distro I used was Manchester University's MCC, followed by Slackware and others.

Worked on Linux on Mainframes and SPARC.

SuSE 8.0
 

Back in 2002, out of morbid curiosity I bought a boxed version of SuSE 8.0, went to the local LUG and tried to make a go of it with mixed results. In 2006 I found a cd of Ubuntu in the lunchroom and have been hooked ever since. Currently using Manjaro.

Had problems with a flaky PC. Had to reinstall the OS several times. Got tired of having to call up MS every time and ask them to release the key. It felt so degrading and stupid. (Not sure if their system works that way now or not...)

Found a site called debian.org. Ran Debian for a few years, then Gentoo, then Debian again.

I eventually turned into a Stallman-style free software fanatic, so I can't go back to Windows or Mac on principle. (Even if I wanted to do so.)

One thing that really kept me hooked is the free development environment. Need a compiler for language X? Download, install. Need some library? Download, install. Need the docs? Download, install. Get bored with language X? Uninstall. You can try anything any time because it doesn't cost you anything.

Coworker
 

A coworker had a copy of SLS or Slackware and we loaded it on a Dell 486/66. I had used Xenix since about 1985 and Solaris since 1991 but this was different. A free, powerful, UNIX clone that was ENTIRELY Open Source. Another contractor said Free BSD would be the O/S of choice and that Linux would go nowhere. I knew otherwise. In 1994, I moved my desktop to Linux and haven't used another desktop for development since (oh, wait, one brief stint doing some Windows stuff on another computer and network).

My buddy had just gotten a random Linux Live CD from some Baghdad marketplace and spent all his free time conjuring magic with his computer and it piqued the hell outta my curiosity and I was kinda jealous of the cool stuff he was learning! So, in 2005 I bought a book on SUSe from Amazon, started out with a dual-boot WinXP/SUSe, but quickly dropped the WinXP, and I haven't ever looked back. Even those lost weekends when I'm trying to fix something I broke, I wouldn't trade. It's just so gosh darned exciting to try out all the distros and programs and desktop environments. And now that I jumped to KDE I don't think I could ever go back.

6 CDs of SuSe
 

I was going to school for software engineering. I had a prerequisite class that I was near the end of. My Windows XP gave me the famous "blue screen of death." So I called a hacker buddy of mine who gave me 6 CDs of SuSe Linux. (Ouch.) Of course, having never used any of the *nixes before, I had a lot of trouble installing it. I did just get my final project done, and still managed to get an A in that class.
A few days later, I call him up and say "Man that Linux sure was a tough install, especially since I had to put CDs in and out of the tray so often. He just laughed and laughed, especially since Knoppix had just come out with one cd that ran live.

Yeah Stateless. That's the beauty of it. If you buy an office quite from M$, you feel like you have to use it. if you download a free one and don't like it, download another free one. I useLibreOffice mostly, but for word docs, I use AbiWord. it's super fast and light.

Early adopter of UNIX -> Linux
 

Was working for Bell Labs in the early 1970s and this new software called UNIX running on DEC machines was available as an alternative to IBM mainframes. Years later, naturally progressed to Linux after retiring from corporations that provided UNIX and Solaris.

I knew about Linux for a long time before I actually got into it. Unfortunately at the time I only had dial-up and even the smallest distros of the time were still too big for me to download. However, as soon as I got my broadband (10Mbps) connection hooked up I downloaded Red Hat (9?). I had issues running it on my legacy hardware so I installed Debian, then finally settled on Slackware 9 a few days later. Within a year I switched to Linux as my primary OS. Now I only run Windows in VM for compatibility checks when I design a website. .... Or those rare instances I have time to play Crysis (1, 2 or 3); all the rest of my gaming is done via Steam on Linux.

I currently run Debian Testing on my laptops and servers for easy maintenance and on-the-fly mission-specific software installs. I run Slackware 14.1 on my workstation for the flexibility and stability (Debian is a bit slow to incorporate proprietary drivers into their repositories, if at all :rolleyes:).

If it were not for LQ.org, I would not be nearly as proficient as I am today.

Fred Langer, editor of Byte magazine, mentioned that he had come across this great little operating system named 'Puppy Linux' that ran in RAM.

I tried it and away we went!

Dick Rounds