LXer: A Linux Story
 

Published at LXer:

I was about five years old when my father showed me my first computer. It was an old 8086, and it had 5.25 floppy drive, a shiny new 3.5 floppy drive, and a 10MB hard drive. When he gave it to me, it ran nothing but MSDOS. As a starter machine, I didn't really care. I was just stoked to have a computer, and when my father showed me how to get to video games, and how to type a text document, I was thrilled. In 1993, my father got himself a Pentium machine, and I received his 486. The 486 also had DOS on it, but when I tried to play my old games everything went by too quickly. I asked my dad what was wrong, and he said that the games I had been playing relied on the CPUs clockspeed. At this point, he gave me a thin orange book, Understanding Microprocessors, which was published by Motorola. He also showed me a book on his shelf that taught me a bit about electricity. A month after this encounter, I went back and asked him if there were any operating systems that would run in protected mode. He told me, yes.

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