I came to Linux, specifically, Slackware Linux, via a long route that started in 1961 while a senior in high school. I took a course at a commercial data processing school and learned IBM tabulating equipment -- that would be punch cards, "programming" with jumper cables on large phenolic boards that plugged in to machines, truly ancient stuff.

The first actual computer I got my hands on was a Honeywell mainframe running GECOS using a ASR-33 Teletype as a terminal -- a dial-up terminal inside the building, no hard-wire stuff. That baby would crank out 10 character per second on a good day and had a paper tape punch/reader that you could use to store programs and data on so you could load and save stuff (or send to somebody else in the mail). Wow-zowie.

And now you know why most of the commands you use are two-three characters; folks wrote most of this stuff on ASR-33s and they are a pain in the finger to type on.

This was about 1972 or so.

GECOS was developed by General Electric (that's the GE part) and was a time sharing system; a bunch of engineers and technicians could, in individual offices and laboratories, all do their thing without knowing that anybody else was one the computer system simultaneously -- no card decks (well, there were, but you didn't need to use them), your own log in and hard disk storage, and it was a real, by-golly computer system that you could use yourself without the guys in the white coats behind the glass walls getting in your way.

When GE sold their computer business to Honeywell, Honeywell improved GECOS here and there and if you were to sit down at a terminal today and use it you'd be pretty familiar with the commands and utilities, many, if not most of them, similar to what you're using now. Ultimately, GECOS got augmented by Multiics. Here, from the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics
Starting to sound familiar? Bell Labs, MIT, GE, Honeywell?

Bell Labs went their own way -- Unix.

Dennis Ritchie (who worked on Multics) invented C, he and Brian Kernighan wrote a book about it, Ken Thompson and crew (where "crew" means a bunch of really, truly smart folks) figured out what an operating system and its utilities needed to do to be useful and viola! here we are. I'm not totally sure on this, but I seem to recall that their first implementations of Unix were on DEC PDP-8s. Something like that.

Actually, Bel Labs folks wrote a lot of books and papers about what they were doing. Got my hands on them, read them, adopted their way of thinking, learned a lot. But, big but here, getting hands on an actual piece of hardware that ran the stuff... well, took a while.

Flash forward to about 1984-ish. The MITS article had appeared in Popular Electronics in 1975; a S-100 bus single-board computer you could build yourself from a kit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_I...emetry_Systems). That quickly led to a revolution -- start-ups began developing and producing actual computers you could buy and, you know, really do stuff with. Be still my heart. No operating system to speak of (you flipped switches to load registers, shades of jumper-wire programming on phenolic boards) until Digital Research came up with a DOS, but, by golly, a real computer. Oh, yeah, they cost about as much as a new car.

Most folks learned to program in assembly language (I still have my Zilog books).

It took a while, but a couple of guys at Stanford, Harry Garland and Roger Melen, formed Cromeco, a high-end, Z-80 based S-100 bus computer manufacturer that developed Cromix, a Unix look-work-alike operating system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco). Cromix ran on Z-80s, in 32-64 KB of RAM (yes, that's not a typo, kilo bytes).

I brought those computers into the company I worked for as laboratory machines (you could do lots of stuff with those machines, analog-to-digital conversion boards, data acquisition, process control), then, after losing a corporate war over engineering computing, I went off and became a value-added-reseller of Cromemco systems at just the right time. Most fun I ever had standing up with my clothes on.

Right about 1984-ish Cromemco released a Motorola 68000-family (excellent processor, those) Unix box. A dual-processor (Z-80 and 68K, dual-boot box -- you could boot Cromix or you could boot Unix. 50 MB disk drive, 1 MB RAM, ran just fine thank you very much.

That's when I had to really start learning stuff about Unix. Editors, text processing, C, AWK, and on and on. You have to remember that there were not any schools, darned few books and a bunch of technical papers and manual pages. Those are what I learned from along with reading other people's code; yeah, in the Goode Olde Days, people readily shared knowledge. You leaned system administration because you had to and learned to write good code because that was the only way you could get anything done -- weren't a lot of companies doing commercial applications.

These boxes were real computer systems -- you'd recognize and be able to use them. Limited RAM, limited disk space (yeah, I really did mean 50 mega byte drives), no X, no internet, dial-up communications, but real, honest-to-gosh multi-user, multi-tasking computer systems. And I couldn't sell you a computer for less than about $10,000 and I couldn't sell you an ASCII video terminal for less than about $2,000. I had a Unix source license -- still have the 9-track tapes and 8-inch floppy boot disk it came on.

Along about 1994 I leaned the most I ever have about Unix -- I was a teacher at Marygrove College in Detroit in their UNIX/C Program, an eight-week, five-days-per-week, eight-hours-per-day course that started with signing on and learning basic utilities though shell programming, C programming and system administration. All you have do is teach and you find out how much you don't know and you have to quick-like-a-bunny get hot on the subject so it'll make sense to students (and, boy-oh-boy will they getcha if you flub it).

At the time I was doing consulting and contract programming on Motorola Unix System 3 systems (VME bus, Motorola 68040 and 88000 RISC boxes) having had to close my doors due to the "Is it IBM compatible?" question asked by almost every customer (and, of course, the answer was, "Well, no, but..."), then on to a couple of Solaris shops doing system administration and data base engineering.

The first I ever heard of Linus Torvalds and the word "Linux" was from a student at Marygrove. Story is that Linus fell in love with Unix, couldn't afford a license (this was during the wars with IBM and other forces of evil) so he developed his own look-work-alike kernel and shared it with the world. And, of course, Richard Stallman and folks had already founded and were building the Free Software Foundation providing Unix-like compilers, editors, utilities and all good things came together at just the right time.

I got introduced to Linux by a network administrator at a company I was programming for on Solaris boxes. I had a PC at home, hated the damned thing but couldn't afford a SPARC workstation for home and was looking to something else. Guy told me that this Slackware was the most unfooled-around-with, most similar to Solaris (which is, after all, System V R4) and, hey, it'll run on your PC and you can get rid of Microsoft altogether. This was about 1998, 1999, 2000? Maybe a little later, maybe a little earlier, don't remember for sure, but it was on CD-ROMs, not floppies.

Oh, died and went to heaven and haven't looked back.

The most important book(s) I ever read was Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming. I have the 1973 edition of the first three volumes (well-worn and still referred to, those) of what is expected to become twelve volumes; haven't picked up volume 4 as yet. Of the roughly 30 other books I have on the shelves are both editions of Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, The C programing Language (also well-worn), a couple by Stephen Kochan and Patrick Wood, notably Topics in C Programming, and a couple by Bruce Schneier, notably Applied Cryptography, 2nd ed.. A real useful one is Alfred Aho, Brian Kernighan and Peter Weinberger, The AWK Programming Language (now you know where the name came from) and another, Morris Bolsky and David Korn, The KornShell Command and Programming Language.

Oldies? You bet. But, folks, things haven't really changed -- those are the basics, those are what you need to know (well, maybe the the cryptography one, but it wouldn't hurt ya). But, hey, I'm getting older than dust so I cling to things).

And the single most important thing you can do? Share what you know. You'll learn a lot.

This has gone on longer than I anticipate, sorry.

Hope this helps some.

I've just learned that Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, one of the giants, died after a long illness 8 October 2011 (born 9 September 1941) at the age of 70.

He gave us the setuid bit (patented in 1972 and placed in the public domain), the C programming language, many contributions to Unix, contributions to Multics, and, lately (as with Unix with Ken Thompson), Plan 9 (he was a science fiction fan after all).

He will be missed.

6 members found this post helpful.

The moment that I installed Slackware...

First of all, hats off to the veterans on this thread. Most of the messages are somewhere in between heart-warming and impressive. My first Linux was Slackware 7.1 back in 2001. At the time, I had to convert a website for a french editor from Cold Fusion to PHP. I've been using EasyPHP on Windows for the job, and at some point, I was just upset with the thing crashing on me all the time. A fellow PHP programmer suggested I "just install Linux", and that was the first time I heard about it. I went to a bookshop here in Montpellier and bought an install CD for Slackware (they also had Mandrake and SUSE, but I thought "Slackware" sounded cooler). Then I registered on a free online course for Linux, called basiclinux.net. This course was run by a bunch of UNIX veterans, and doing this course for learning how to get along with my PC was a bit like wanting to "work out a little" and then enlisting in the French Foreign Legion I went through a lot of trial and error, like posting HTML-formatted "PLEASE HELP NEWBIE" messages with Outlook Express to the list and asking what "RTFM" could possibly mean, but eventually, I learned from my mistakes and after a few months, I was hooked. I went through a lot of trial-and-error and learning-by-doing, and only in the last few years, I've bought a pile of O'Reilly books and tried to study things more thoroughly.

Tried Fedora Core 4. It was neat.

Then I came *here* and decided slackware was the only way to slack.

Yes, these forums without a doubt are what I used to learn the bulk of my linux knowledge.

Thank you, these forums.

Lets see.. I started on linux fairly recently - 2004 or so, I burned my first linux CDs, one of the fedora cores, I don't remember the number. I played with it for about a month or two then wandered off. I came back to linux with, once again, fedora, and I kept it around for a little bit longer, but again got bored of it and the partition went unused for a rather long time.
Then, I was talking to a friend of mine and the conversation sparked a renewed interest in linux and I got Fedora back on my fedora partition, and loved it. It had some problems but I ended up replacing windows with it. After distro hopping for a while I decided to try out slackware. It was a bit intimidating at first but I had used the bash shell in fedora fairly often and was able to get my first full install of slackware sometime in 2006 (so version 11 I think) I've tried out a lot of distros but I always come back to Slackware and Fedora, with a few Live distros on hand for if I need them.

As for how I learn linux, it is primarily a lot of trial and error. I would try to do something, realize I don't know how too, and go through all the Man pages, documentation, and articles I could find relating to it, I got the Slackware linux essentials book, I learned to use bash from online tutorials, and I continue to learn in much the same way. When I come across something I'm not sure of, or a program I don't know, I first go to the man pages, then to google, and if all else fails I ask on IRC or a forum somewhere. I've bought books on Linux and read things I find online. I'm not an by any means expert but generally with the vast array of resources available to me online and in print, I've managed to do anything I've really felt the need or desire to do on linux, given a bit of time to figure it out.

Also.. this is a rather old topic.

I started with Slackbrain 73.31 in 2042 and haven't looked back. It installed into a lightly used portion of my brain. Kind of like burning a cd but not much.

lol! Don't you mean "Won't look forward"?
That's the problem with Time-travellers: they can never keep their tenses straight!

My dad was playing around with Slackware in 94-96, back in the old country, and so it happened to be my first teenage GNU/Linux experience.

I got started with Linux back in 97 or 98ish. I was working at a local dialup ISP installing new accounts and doing tech support. I had been there for about 6 months and had just started learning how to setup new users on our servers which were running BSD. One day our sys admin did not come in to work. After the 4th day the owner came over to my desk and dropped the BSD manual on my desk and said "You've just been promoted."

So knowing there was no way I was going to learn on live systems I started looking around for ways I could install Unix on my own machines. Most of my first searches took me info on Slackware. Downloaded everything to install it and then started looking at and printing as many HOW-TO's as I could find.

It installed perfected on my machine that I had at work which if I recall was a P1-166 with 4 megs of ram. I remember it installed perfected, everything was recognized and worked out of the box. After getting comfortable with it I decided to try and take it home and install it on my machine at home so I could keep learning more, which was a 386DX40. I remember having quite a time getting dialup working.

After that I have pretty much always used Slackware as much as I can. I did go back to windows quite a bit because of gaming. When Everquest came out my linux time took a big hit lol.

I've tried a lot of other distro's. But I am a true creature of habit. Slackware is what I am comfortable with and it's what I know. It's what I always come back to.

Once Slackware64 came out I went back to dual booting my main desktop. Because of my job I have to keep windows around. Plus I still play a few games that require it.

a friend got me started using slckware mostly as a hardware diagnostic tool back in 1998 or so. i could repair trashed dos and windows partitions with slack that MS disk tools would not even try or allow. as my interest in linux grew i used it dual boot along with windows until 2009 when i went 100% slack on my machine. if i really need real ms windows, i have a copy running on virtualbox.

I think I've come to an understanding about computers that I will admit took me a long time to realize. No one operating system is better than another due to the strengths and weaknesses of each. I've learned Windows, MacOS, Linux, and BSD all fairly much equally, but I've found that to really get the mileage out of a system you have to multi-boot different operating systems.

I have my machines always with Slackware and a copy of the latest version of Windows I can get via OEM. There's so much more administration, hardware level checking, and database checking I can do more with Linux and safely than I can with Windows, but I use Windows a lot for other things like entertainment purposes.

The first distro I installed was LBA Linux in 2005. Very easy installer. However, in a couple of months the distribution was discontinued and I had to look for another one. Played with Fedora 3 and 4 for a while... However, there was some annoying bug with X that made my mouse pointer look like a square of vertical lines. One evening I installed Slackware and never looked back. Mouse pointer looked just as it should and the system felt so snappy. So, I can say I started learning Linux after I installed Slackware 10.1, back in 2005. I read everything at slackware.com and after that Google was my guide.


PS: tronayne, thank you for the very interesting post!

Quote:

Where did U start learning linux?

Right here, where I am now. Sat in front of a computer.

My time frame: 1969. Unit records & programming the IBM 360/mod20 then moving to the IBM/1103 at a later date. Remembering RPG, COBOL and BAL programming with those damn card decks! Flow charting everything! My mitts are big, typing was rather hard for me. I would gladly pay someone else to punch my programs(punch room was limited access). Wired programming panels for sorters, readers and punch/re-punch was time consuming. Especially when someone would rip the panel and dispose of your wire-list. Better yet, throw away the drum card. Or even tear your tape and you must make a repair then back to the end of the Que.
Or run into someone and they just happen to have your card box(s). Re-sort! Then back, to be placed at the end again.
Ah the ASR-33, noisy and got the job done. I built my first Intel 8080 single board with a serial comm port. Modified to use the 20mA loop with a photo-isolator. Bootstrap the baby with 256K Eprom and a Basic I/O, system had originally 256byte memory then expanded to 1024K. I was in heaven! I really did not care for the paper tape read on the ASR-33 so I designed and built a reader based on photo-transistor array. Much faster but the I/O routine had to be CRC for validity. One of the reasons for expanded memory along with another Eprom mapped for extended routine storage. Moved on by building a true video terminal board to interface with a TV via composite. Keyboard was a simple qwerty mechanical/electronic robbed from a damaged console with a bad CRT. I still have that system, has not been fired for years but could possibly still boot. Capacitors would be the weak point but I really would not want to waste my time replacing everything.
All too true! You got digital exercise.

Little later for me on the IBM 1103 then the DEC 8 and then DEC 11 series. I was one of the guys in the white coats that would do everything to stay out of the way.
We were beneficiary since we moved from IBM frames to the new boys on the block(cheaper) DEC.
I still have loads of books in my library that were from that circa.
I still have my homebrew S-100 system(s). Yes, very expensive to build at the time. I moved some of my designs for a console over to the S-100 system. I had sold the ASR-33 to a colleague for him to build a single board system. Advantages at times to debug via the front panel. Heck we even used the front panels on the DEC equipment(circa 1978) to trouble-shoot, debug & diagnose problems.
Zilog was ahead of the time. Loved the Z-80. Built a single board Z-80 before I purchased a TRASH-80 (TRS-80). At the time I could not afford to buy the expansion interface for it. So I built my own, took about 3 months of burning the candle at both ends. But that baby allowed my systems to have expanded memory, amplified cassette I/O, Disk I/O and I even included a buffered Address/DATA I/O on the front panel (old habits die hard). I even included 44-Buss expansion unit within for I/O interfacing. Single stepped control and tagged/latched control for debugging.

I had moved on from Admin/maintenance of systems to the University to enhance my experience via research. My micro experience opened these doors via interface methodologies. Designed and built systems along with the sub-systems. Mechanical, electronic computing abilities helped with the digital programming requirements for implementing the home-brew equipment within the laboratories. I was exposed to equipment that some people only dream of. Luck really played no part. Determination and drive opened the doors that benefited my professional life and allowing me to provide the knowledge to others via students.
Boy those were the days! Writing code that was tight, clean and sometimes utilize re-entrant flagging to allow minimal code (semi or metaphoric) multi-tasking multi-user. Winchester or SMD allowed us to have massive storage at a cost. I remember the first 5 MB drive that was purchased at just under $1000 dollars. Some of our SMD removable Gold multi-platter diskpacks were around $5K each, drives were around $50K. Smaller Winchesters packs were around $2500/ea with the drives at around $10K. So to get drive with 5MB <$1k was a deal. Personally purchased my first 5MB drive.
My UNIX started around the birth and extended throughout. Acquired the first release of Slackware and have been using it since. Much cheaper to use a PC and have a UNIX-like OS then to have a 3B1 or 3B2 at the time. Even with a granted unit it was easier to use my PC since modification(s) of the OS on the PC was doable personally. That way instrumentation could be developed within the LAB. The 3B units were granted to the University and I personally had one granted to me but licensed to the school. One of the main reasons to move to the PC was cost & license restrictions for the 3B. Free 3B was not really free! I used the PC to develop thus things were mine, no arguments.
It was a very sad day. Yes, he will be missed by all who knew him!

That is one of the reasons for my contributions to LQ. Extend the knowledge by sharing. Open doors for others that did not benefit as we did when the Electronic Computer industry was birthed and growing. It's sad that our youth cannot be motivated in the way we were. Excited to learn the intricacy of how things work or even have the curiosity to open things to understand functionality. Most need to be spoon fed! Biased but true!

Thanks tronayne for the drive down Memory Lane. Omissions for sure but a general description for some of my experiences and memories. One other thing, I have a magnetic core mounted on my LAB wall just to remind me of those old days.

1 members found this post helpful.

Gary,

Omissions? Well, yeah a couple or three (dang, that post was getting long!); but you reminded me...

I, too, have a real honest-to-goodness core memory card hanging on the wall (used to pass it around in classes so they could see what a "core dump" actually went to), even fired it up one day from a couple of ancient IC's, a battery and some wires -- and the danged thing actually worked. Plus, you know, in the right light it's kinda pretty.

Hands down, though, the best thing I think I've ever seen was the Bombe at Bletchley Park, Bletchley, Milton Keynes, UK on a visit. They have the thing working (well, sorta)! They have real Enigma machines (working!). Lot's of ghosts present and accounted for there; http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/museum1.rhtm.

Thanks, too, for your post -- brought back a lot of memories, lots of burned fingers from soldering stuff and checking too quickly, lots of frustrations, lots of joys when the blasted things actually worked.

Thomas