This is off topic but I am curious about your OS time line
what variant of unix did you use? do you use the *BSD variants now?
you're welcome. Originally, I was into electronics, as a hobby, first. I had production equipment for PCB (2-sided). etc. - that all went somehow astray over the decades.
Then, around 1985, I understood that one can build a computer as well (the usual 8-bit "homecomputer" type). But then I didn't need to, because some spare piece came along that was originally designed as a kind of office computer, equipped with a 650X processor. So I figured how that would work, and learned assembler.
Then I got into some people who did buy PC/XT clones from Taiwan to sell them again. Those would run with DOS. And in 1987 I got into some people who knew about the Internet, and I decided that I want that. And that was quite difficult at that time.
So, I had two wires. One was used to dial out and fetch some news. The other was for people to dial in -onto the same machine- and read these news. And meanwhile I intended to read and answer my mails - on the same machine.
DOS cannot do that - if you dial out, the whole computer will be busy with dialing-out, and nothing else can be done meanwhile. But I knew how the computer is built, and that the computer itself whould have no problem in doing all these things at the same time. Only you cannot do it with DOS. You still could not do it with Windows 3. You might have been able to do it with Windows 95, but that would appear only 8 years later, would then require a 32bit machine, and would still be quite hard to get it properly configured - and then you would need to cater for all the useless graphical overhead crap which would not go thru a serial line anyway.
Thats when I learned about unix, and that unix will instantly do all that I wanted, with no overhead at all. That one only needs to connect modems to the serial interfaces, and then
getty(8) will already know how to handle these. And that unix can run on 16bit (because the original PDP-11 was nothing else).
Around 1990 that had worked out more or less into something that actually worked and did the things as intended - on an 80286. (Obviousely the unix had also come somehow from Taiwan and I doubt that it was legal.)
1993 I figured out about Linux, and that, being a full release including kernel sources, appeared a lot more promising. But then I started to recognize the downsides; yes, there were sources - but it wasn't clear who would have written which part of them or who would be responsible for any version - if there were intellegible versions at all. It was all just a heap of chaos, or -as others had termed it- an oriental bazaar.
And that was when a friend (and I am very thankful) brought me this CD for chrismas:
Code:
# dir /cdrom
total 176
drwxr-xr-x 9 tty tty 2048 Dec 22 1995 .
drwxr-xr-x 26 root wheel 512 Jul 21 09:17 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 tty tty 0 Dec 19 1995 FreeBSD-2.1.0-RELEASE
-rw-r--r-- 1 tty tty 18782 Dec 18 1995 HARDWARE.TXT
-rw-r--r-- 1 tty tty 26256 Dec 18 1995 INSTALL.TXT
-rw-r--r-- 1 tty tty 5732 Dec 18 1995 MIRROR.SITES
-rw-r--r-- 1 tty tty 5372 Dec 18 1995 README.TXT
-rw-r--r-- 1 tty tty 14797 Dec 18 1995 RELNOTES.TXT
drwxr-xr-x 7 tty tty 61440 Dec 19 1995 distfiles
drwxr-xr-x 16 tty tty 2048 Dec 22 1995 dists
drwxr-xr-x 2 tty tty 2048 Dec 19 1995 docs
drwxr-xr-x 2 tty tty 28672 Dec 19 1995 incoming
drwxr-xr-x 31 tty tty 4096 Dec 19 1995 packages
drwxr-xr-x 27 tty tty 4096 Dec 19 1995 ports
drwxr-xr-x 4 tty tty 2048 Dec 19 1995 tools
I was looking at that disk (it contains not only the base system, but most of the ports also), and I was thinking:
how many man-hours of development have gone into that little thing?
And that basically was it. For a while I was still using FreeBSD and NetBSD in parallel and trying to figure out which would suit me better. But nothing else any more since then.
