When did you first learn of this "Unix thing"?

ShelLuser

ShelLuser

Hi gang!

So.. at the time of writing I'm putting the finishing touches on my virtual FreeBSD box (powered by Hyper-V). There's still plenty to (re)configure (Apache, Tomcat, mod_mono, etc.) but I finished restoring a lot of my old data which I kept on my NAS storage so far, and well... it sure brings back memories, including stupid ones. Did you know that Theo de Raadt once got booted from UnderNet #linux? ;) By, what I can only describe in hindsight as some (kinda) elitist (but still friendly!) chanops? Fun fact: I'm also talking about myself right now, because I was one of them 🤭

I'm checking up on old logs and stuff which go all the way back to 2003 and earlier...
Code: 
--- Log opened Tue Jun 18 11:14:42 2002
11:14 *** Joins: Lion-O [peter@catslair.xs4all.nl] has joined #linux
11:14 ### [#linux] Total of 113 nicks [@11,+0]
11:14 ### Join to #linux was synced in 3 secs
[...]
11:25 <Guyver> morning freaks.
11:25 <MattJ> Hey Guyver.
11:25 <Lion-O> Mornin'
11:25 <Lion-O> Hi Matt
11:26 <MattJ> Lion-O: apache-1.3.25 is tagged in CVS
11:26  * Tron *sighs* LOTS of lamers on #Japan - had to set it +m :( :( :(
11:26 <Tron> bleh
11:27 <Lion-O> Tron: eew :(
11:27 <troyC> Tron: japan is small ... ;)
^ Back in the good ole ADSL days... I really prefer my cable connection right now ;)

But anyway, back to my question: when did you first learn (or hear) about this "Unix" thing? And since we're offtopic I think Linux should be fair game too.

My story goes back to the 90's, so even before the above events. I had finished a study on network administration which basically consisted of generic systems administration (Windows 3.11 FTW back then ;)), database administration (dBase III & IV) and eventually an extra course on Novell (Netware) systems administration. I managed to secure an internship with Olivetti which was pretty cool. Well, that's when one of my mentors talked about his mainframe maintenance session and how they finished a major update and optimization, all on the commandline. Which was kinda special because they worked with a team of 3 admins at the same time, on the same computer environment.

Yah, in a time when we still had DOS, Windows 3.11 (as mentioned) and Windows NT was still pretty new and according to my former colleague definitely didn't had the same capabilities.

Which is when I learned that he was talking about... ayups: Unix. That "weird" commandline OS which would even allow you to multitask straight from the commandline itself?!

This eventually led up to me grabbing "InfoMagic Linux resources": a 6 CD box which got you several Linux distributions (Debian, RedHat, Slackware) which could be installed on a PC. That was pretty much the main trigger for me. I bought several books (Linux unleashed, UNIX unleashed) and The Magic garden explained => a book about the internals of Unix SysV rel. 4. (ISBN 0-13-098138-9). Even today that book is still an awesome read IMO.

But yah, that started it. One or two years later I was working as a systems administrator for a small firm and they were busy with database development (based on SmartStream iirc), all hosted on a Sun sparc station, running Sun Solaris (obviously). One day that box started causing problems and... lo and behold: I managed to resolve all that (read: I managed to safely shut down the database process, backup the data, kill the stalled process and restart things). All thanks to my Linux self-study. 3 months later I found myself sent to a professional course about Solaris systems administration, at Sun HQ itself.

Which eventually also led me to FreeBSD.. I was a vivid user of Solaris/x86 back in the day but when Oracle took over... I found my way to FreeBSD. Never looked back either.

So yah.... figured I'd share (hopefully not too offtopic).

What's your story? If you have one & are willing to share of course :)
 
ShelLuser said:
But anyway, back to my question: when did you first learn (or hear) about this "Unix" thing?
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While searching for new things to do with my Amiga, I had found NetBSD could run on it. Unfortunately not on mine, my A4000/030 lacked the required MMU :(
So this was probably in the late '90s. As I used my Amiga to get on the internet around that time. And the internet showed me a world of computing I never knew existed.

ShelLuser said:
Back in the good ole ADSL days... I really prefer my cable connection right now
Click to expand...
Went from 14K4/28K8 modem dialup, to ISDN, to ADSL, ADSL2, HDSL, Cable (DOCSIS), fibre. But yeah, the switch from a metered connection (dialup, ISDN) to flat-fee DSL was amazing. Did wonders for my phone bill 😁
 
Sometime before 1981. Having dad work for Bell Labs and bringing home an old thermal paper dialup tty device didn't hurt.
 
ShelLuser said:
...

But anyway, back to my question: when did you first learn (or hear) about this "Unix" thing? And since we're offtopic I think Linux should be fair game too.

...
Click to expand...

My first encounter with Unix was at the University, some 30 years ago, where I was given telnet access to one of the servers in the electronics department to develop some software for my thesis. At professional level, I started working with AT&T Unix SVR4 on Apr 2nd 1997, exactly 28 years ago.

My journey with Linux started in 1996 with Slackware 3.0 (kernel 0.8something if my mind serves me) and ended last June when I moved my main system to FreeBSD. At work I still manage lots of Linux VMs, though.
 
Year 2000. My first PC. Now thinking about it - 25 years ago!
In these days we used to have PC magazines and some of them included Linux CD`s ... as i used to buy these magazines - every time CD with Linux - i would spin it up to see what is what.
Full time UNIX user since 2012/2013

SirDice said:
Went from 14K4/28K8 modem dialup, to ISDN, to ADSL, ADSL2, HDSL, Cable (DOCSIS), fibre. But yeah, the switch from a metered connection (dialup, ISDN) to flat-fee DSL was amazing. Did wonders for my phone bill 😁
Click to expand...
I dont recall but around 2001 used to be a some sort of "black box" and my buddies used to use it - kinda masked internet usage over phone lines and you could use phone as well. Lithuania got broadband late 2000 early 2001 ... considering state of our nation - it was impressive
 
First I heard, and read about that there was something like Unix, and grabbed a rough idea what it was about was in the early 80s.
Back then in (west) germany computering was called EDV (Elektronische Datenverarbeitung - 'electronic data processing') In those days you weren't simply 'allowed' to just use a computer. It was strongly recommended to take a computers class, or at least read books about the topic in general. I had both. While computer classes already focused on MS-DOS, and my first machine also ran this crap 3.2, my first idea of Unix was from such books, only. Very professional, no graphics at all, but white (or green, or amber) text on black consoles, only - not only very boring for a teenager while anybody else had a colorful flashy, and noisy homecomputer, but Unix machines were also completely unreachable, anyway. Only universities, or large companies could afford such.

About my Amigas (500er & 2000er) from the late 80s I was told its OS was kinda like somewhat unixlike, with its shell, multitasking, and scripting language. Couldn't judge then. Simply loved my A2000.

My first real contact with real Unix was autumn 1992. At university there were two rooms with a dozen Sun Sparc stations free to use. It was love at first glance. That was computering how it has to be. I really loved those. Absolute reference to me since then. Never reached again - Windows was, and still is to me a half-hearted imitation, a bad joke about computering; also several attempts with various Linuxes did not really convince me; too many things broken, bad to no documentation at all, too many too fast changes on the software while updates on the documentation lagged massively behind, if even done, if there was any at all... C R A P ! ... - until I started on FreeBSD (10.2 I believe.)
Homecoming. 😍O:‑)🌈⭐

I don't care how it's called - un*x, or unixlike - as long as it works exactly like that,
and I don't have to spend most of my time to give chase to some anarchic, chaotic, unreliable Linux jungle-junk, just for to have a working machine for a couple of hours per day.
I am a user: I actually use my machine. Customizing, installing, updating, and dealing with broken dependencies for me are maintaining, but not using the machine.

FreeBSD simply worx. Reliably. Is close enough to Unix for me - or to be more correct: BSD, which I prefer over "original AT&T Unix" as the "better Unix" :cool:
 
Maybe when I first heared about Unix was early 80'es.

Not on my own computer, but the first time I've touched "something LOOKS like Unix" was "Uni+" (pronounced as if it's spelled like unickross), a palody sets of programs implementing quite limited commands of Unix in disk BASIC, published in palody version (sold at April fool's day) of a Japanese magazine as program lists. (One of my friend typed, saved and ran it on his computer.)

The first time I've tried Unix-like "real" OS was Minix, maybe on '86 or '87.
But not tried deep enough, as of too strict restrictions on resources.

Next time was FreeBSD 2.1.6, and kept on sniffing when I got installation medias until OS/2 (my previous daily driver) EoL'ed and switched to FreeBSD.

In the meantime, tried some Linux distros, but I like FreeBSD better.
The only exception was 2 models of Linux Zaurus as PDAs.
 
I had heard of Unix. At one of the places I worked starting in 1985 we had a PDP-11, I think. Was that Unix? The only thing I used it for was compiling C for the real-time OS we were using for a standalone system. But the thing just bogged down so badly we eventually replaced it with a Sun system. The company hired a guy to teach us Unix but I was a real-time, embedded guy who loved assembly so I got bored and didn't attend.

I found out about FreeBSD, somehow, and made some floppies. Don't recall the version but it must have been 1.x but I couldn't figure out how to install it.

Got hired in 1992 by SGI for my video expertise so I really had to dig into Unix but that job didn't end well.

To round out the story, several years later, I decided to start a web dev business. My wife's niece's husband is a higher up at some company and got me any imaginable programming tool for Windows (don't tell anyone!). It was such a steep learning curve with far too much disk space for the itty-bitty thing I wanted to put together that he suggested I switch to Linux.

I don't remember which distro I tried to install but I just couldn't get it to work. Frustrated and under a little pressure, I pulled out those old FreeBSD floppies and installed it on the first go! Perhaps I was just older and wiser but I remember asking myself why I struggled with it years earlier. I bought the book FreeBSD Unleashed! which came with 5.0 CDs (I still have it on my bookshelf) and the rest.............is history.
 
That'd be Unix Version 7 in a PDP11, the System V on Motorola (which had FTP and telnet). Unix has gone downhill since Version 7.

I started a hosting company (on the technical side) around 1992. Switched to FreeBSD a couple of years later. Could have gone for Linux, but why use the knock-off when you could now get the real thing for free ;-)
 
We ran Unix on company servers in the 1990's, first it was SecTOS (Secure Targon Operating System) on servers from Nixdorf Computer (like the Targon 31 in this link), later those servers got replaced with never servers from Siemens Nixdorf, RM-400 and RM-600 models. These servers ran SINIX, which was System V Release 3 based. The interesting part about the whole system is that all the PC's were diskless, booted from the network and ran Sun's PC-NFS for disk. So the servers did everything; database (Oracle), applications and file servers.

My personal "big win" was that I managed to get uucp and S-News (I think that's what it was called) installed, configured (and in case of S-News compiled) so that we could have a dial-up (we had a modem, but no permanent internet connection) UseNet feed via uucp. As I recall, most stuff, including INN (InterNetNews) was configured to compile on System V Release 4, so getting it to compile on something that was System V Release 3 wasn't easy. I couldn't get INN to compile, so we ended up with S-News.
 
I took a class in high school called Fundamentals of Networking, I think it was put on by Alcatel or something. We learned Red Hat Enterprise Linux and it was fascinating to me. The best memory for me was controlling my classmates' computers remotely opening and closing their CD-ROM drives! Nowadays, I could take that up a level or 2 and make the monitor turn off / on, keyboard and mouse stop working, etc. The ability to "program" every mundane detail on a system is pretty awesome.

Fast forward a few years, I've experimented with many distributions, my favorites being Gentoo and Funtoo. With the frustrations those presented, I landed on FreeBSD.
 
I remember in the mid-ninety to buy the few magazines talking about CGI I could find, and always all top workstation were Spark computer running Unix...
 
In the begining 90, the serious CAD programs (at this time) ran under UNIX.
I made some renderings with povray, and read about such possibilitie with linux in some magazines.
A friend installed me a slackware with 50 floppy (linux 0.99pl14).
And I needed to investigate in 16 mb RAM to be able to work with X-Window.
I had No internet at this time, I was forced to read the man pages and to call my friend every evenings to solve my problems...
 
I 1st learned about it from people in a color computer group in the early 80s in OKC. They worked with support for the AT&T 3B2. The coco was running Microware OS9 which did about as much Unix as it could on the 6809 processor with 64k. I used real Unix systems in '85 and was porting Sys V R 4 to the Nat Semi NS32016 in '86. I had access to Sun 4s with 32 bit graphics in '87, real internet over x.25 in '88, SMP in '93 and real virtualization on the big iron E10k in '96. Each step was both about learning new stuff and learning what old stuff to throw out.
 
Back in high school I was tasked with setting up a basic web server with no instructions or oversight. All I had was google. I was given two distros to choose from; Ubuntu or Fedora Core. I chose Ubuntu because the gnome2 theme, at the time, looked "cooler". It felt alien as hell, but liberating. Like going to science museum for the first time.. or something. After the Windows 8 disaster I started looking else where. Played with my Uncles mac, and fell in love with Aqua's polish and user experience. A few years later became a Tier 2 support advisor at a certain "FruitCare" company and gained my troubleshooting chops there. I wanted a server to accompany Mac OS X that doesn't run exclusively on mac hardware (this was around when systemd started fscking Linux in its entirety, and CentOS 6 was nearing EOL). So I did a little bit of Google dorking and found out about OpenDarwin (or PureDarwin?). Then realized how useless it was, but also came across its underpinnings being based on FreeBSD. So I dug into all sorts of FreeBSD related crap; history, its design and implementation, features and community, and FreeBSDs long history with Apple. Then tinkered with FreeBSD for servers/embedded stuff exclusively since then. And the rest was history.
 
I have no idea. Probably around 1980, plus or minus two years. At the latest in 1982: A friend was working as a student helper at the Bonn University astronomy institute, and they hade one VAX (the small, which alternated between running VMS half the day, and Unix the other half of the day. Since they had only one disk drive, this was done by swapping the disk pack twice a day (supposedly at noon and midnight).

First time I logged into a Unix machine and did work on it? Not clear. Definitely by 1988 I was using the Sun machines of my university's computer center. I think most of those were still 68K based Sun 3s; the first Sparc machines to come out were only used by the computer science department, and now accessible by lowly physicists.
 
UNIX seemed almost mythical to me. I had heard of it, but it was always assumed to be something "military grade", that the average person was unlikely to get their hands on. I started with FreeBSD 8.x back in 2012 and found it a struggle to get things configured and working. Then had various problems with 9.x around the time of the move from sysinstall to bsdinstall. On my old PC at the time I had to install 8.x and upgrade it to 9.x, to avoid GPT, but the problems didn't end there - eventually I gave up and moved to OpenBSD.

In 2020 I revisited FreeBSD due to a work project. I have now been running it since 12.x. A few problems with Intel graphics driver bugs along the way and had to purge all packages for the 14.1 to 14.2 upgrade - apart from that it's been a good experience.

Before that it was Linux since around 2008, when I started using Debian (I had a mess about with some other distributions such as Mandrake and Ubuntu from 2002 onwards). I probably had a vague idea that Linux was UNIX-like. Up to that point it was all MSDOS/Windows and AmigaOS.

In the UK hardly anyone has heard of UNIX or FreeBSD. I deal with a lot of IT people on a daily basis and though most have heard of Linux, they know little to nothing about it. If you mention the BSDs, Solaris, UNIX, etc, you may as well be speaking a different language.
 
I started programming in PL/I on EC1022 (aka System/360) in 1982. In 1990 I switched to MSDOS (wrote in Turbo-Pascal and TASM), in 1995 to Windows NT 3.51 - started write in C. And in C++ (since 1999). In 1997 I tried Linux (Slackware, Red Hat), FreeBSD (with no success), and Solaris. In 2000 I completely switched to Solaris.
I returned to Linux (Debian) in 2011. In 2022 - to FreeBSD.
 
During the 1930s my dad started working with computing machinery in the US Army. He eventually programmed a PDP-8. Primarily he pragmatically sought to remain close to electricity on battlefields and after the war, to put food on the table.

No doubt, some of sort of Unix was unknowingly used by me at colleges during the 1970s. Unix on a PC was purposefully and passionately pursued by me in the early 1990s when Dr Dobbs Journal published Lynne and William Jolitz 386BSD as a series.
 
This was the first Unix system I encountered in about 1984 https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/63966/ICL-PERQ-1-Workstation/ which used UNIX system 3
in 1986 I worked with this Machine. http://www.vintage-icl-computers.com/Unix DRS300.JPG that ran Unix sVr3
then 1989 we had the DRS6000 server. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/darr...f-computing-activity-7280878219300335616-Aw0M
which used Unix sVr4.

Transitioned to SUN servers in the end of the 1990:es https://shrubbery.net/~heas/sun-feh-2_1/Systems/E10000/E10000.html
then 10 years later we got Fujitsu SPARC servers https://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/corporate/history/products/computer/server/primepower.html
and finally the last generation SPARC the M10/M12 system https://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/servers/unix/sparc/
 
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