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

First unix system I can remember using was an ancient pdp 8 in the physics lab at uni. They taught us basics like filesystem, how to write shell using ed, etc, it didn't have vi. Then a bit later on I did an actual programming course on a vax running dec unix. I guess that was roughly around early to mid 80s, maybe around 1983 or 4?. Before the unix stuff I was programming 8-bit micros (z80, 6502) and of course got heavily into PCs once they came out. I think the first unix I ever ran on a pc was actually mark williams coherent, which I really liked, that was even before I got my first version of linux or freebsd. I worked programming RS/6000 series machines running AIX for several years too; that was nice hardware. And I've written a ton of commercial product software running on linux over the years. I've always had a second string in electronics design, embedded, etc. I think I first got playing with freebsd some time in the early 2000's, I think it was probably version 4, but it's hard to remember now.

And now... I'm writing this on a little N100 mini pc, the whole machine measures about 6" x 6" x 2", which has several orders of magnitude more CPU mips, RAM and storage than anything I used back then.. and its running unix! :)
 
The Unix culture of peoples on this forum is truly amazing, It's pleasant to read👍

I'm very nostalgic for that time, which I didn't experience myself, but reliving part of it, using FreeBSD and CDE desktop, is even great.
 
1999 I was trying to run an email server out of my house. Struggling with Windows98 (and SE). I'd get the email server running and working and left it running overnight only to find the computer had rebooted spontaneous. The struggle continued into late 2001 when I told a friend (who became a mentor) about my issues. He laughed and said, "What do you expect from Windows? It will always fail.", and he pointed me to FreeBSD. I took off work for 6 weeks to immerse myself in FreeBSD. By mid-2002 I had a reliable, stable postfix (later qmail, now opensmtpd) system running on FreeBSD.

I've never looked back.
 
I first heard of 'this UNIX thing' back in 1995 or 1996, when my school opened up email usage to pre-teen kids. Back then, SMTP and email was stuff of legends, it was reserved for the adults in the workforce, and not that many people even knew how to use it. This magical communication tech (a.k.a. email) was possible because of a UNIX server that was apparently installed in a backroom closet at my school.

I only caught a glimpse of it, all I saw was a dark space inside some open door, with some rows of blinking lights and cables sprouting out.

Come to think of it, I learned about the very existence of C++ as a programming language around the same time. I was in 7th grade at the time. It did take me a couple years to realize what the heck I was looking at, and to become interested in it and make sense of it. After all, there was good reason to not exactly trust pre-teen kids around computers back then - it was de facto production systems, a rather fragile enchilada that would take a lot of effort to set up and recover from a snapped cable or a dropped chassis.
 
You all have amazing stories from the 80s!! That gives me a nice big picture of how was UNIX seen at those days.
You're also making me feel really young, since my first contact with UNIX-likes was in the 2000s.

Venezuela, as other south-american countries started projects of the "One Laptop Per Child" type. I remember having to wait, as a really young kid, on this big line, on a state far away from mine, for a lot of hours. It worth it anyways, that would be my first personal computer. It had the national GNU/Linux distribution installed ("Canaima", still maintained!).

That "GNU/Linux" thing kept being mentioned a lot of times in the system programs and computer classrooms, like they really wanted to make you notice it. I was too young to understand what an operating system and that was.
I loved how the whole GUI looked different from the other computers i got hands on. It felt kinda magical...

I couldn't see the value of open source operating systems at that time, and i changed the laptop system to Windows 7 (a movement that i find despicable at this time), but i would always remember GNU/Linux as a magical and kind of esoteric thing.

As years passed by, the increased popularity of open source software and its efficiency made me remember of my good times using GNU/Linux and i used different distros as my main system. Anyways, i found that the GNU/Linux development and community felt kind of a mess for me, at a point that i would really care about that.

Looking for other open source alternatives, i found FreeBSD, and i fell in love with the good and readable documentation, the kind community and the easiness of the configuration for the system.
My first steps with FreeBSD were, and still are messy.
I had to keep using GNU/Linux as my main system. But i would keep thinking a lot about FreeBSD at the point that i needed to use it and learn how to do it better.

At this time, I'm making my way through making FreeBSD my main system, everyday with more interest on that task. And i love it so much that I'm even considering the fact of working with system administration in a future.
 
Pretty similar Sun experience. From the E10K to the E15K, from the M9K to the M6. Then we decided to dump Oracle so I didn't get the opportunity to work on the latest M1x bad boys. I worked on SPARC hardware for about twenty years, I really loved that stuff.
 
DEC Ultrix back in college, and just about every variant of UNIX that has existed since then...Tried Linux early on, at the insistence of my then boss, but it was way too unstable for our needs, so settled on BSDi releases for a lot of our in-house small server needs...Got more into the linux ecosystem when the 2.4 kernel became mature and I started needing to do linux-from-scratch and embedded Linux implementations.
 
Probably about 15 years ago. I tried installing each new release, but I could never get any desktop other than TWM working. I would always run into some problem that was beyond my skill set to fix. I did use several FreeBSD-based devices like M0n0wall, OPNSense, Asterisk, and FreeSwitch.

With release 14, I was finally able to get an xfce4 desktop working, and I love it. Three things made the difference: 1) The installation got easier, 2) I learned more about FreeBSD, and 3) I discovered the FreeBSD forums. (This was probably the most important one. The forum has gotten me out of several jams.)

I now have a FreeBSD system with xfce4 as my daily driver, and I love it.

Meanwhile, my older brother has become a solid OpenSUSE Linux user. (He is not as irritated as I am by GNU/Linux becoming SystemD/Linux, and the hodge-podge packaging and testing.)

Sadly, I am going to be doing some traveling, and I have not been able to get FreeBSD working on my laptop, so I may have to go back to Windows for a bit. However, since I have dumped all my proprietary Windows-only programs and switched to open source, the transition back and forth is much less troublesome than it used to be.
 
Followed the podcast 'TechSnap' from first episode - and later 'BSDnow'.
One of the hosts was a certain Allan Jude guy :)
I was already using the gateway-drugs: FreeNAS and pfSense - and thanks to the podcasts installed PC-BSD on my laptop and later attended my first EuroBSDCon...
The rest is history.

Before that it was Linux at university(1998) and X-terminals at work(1996) before that.

We need more gateway-drugs!!! I only see pfSense/opnSense and NomadBSD...
 
Heared about the Unix-thing back in 2009.

My wadnows laptop became cluttered with updates. Bought a Netbook (AAO, Acer) with Linux and became interested (obsessed) with the FOSS- and Unix philosophy. Switched to FreeBSD version 11 for i386 support, but soon discovered the True Meaning of Free Personal Computing. Freedom of Choice -- co workers don't even understand the freedom of choosing your own DE/WM (but all want to 'personalize' their hamburger and car).

Had a Mac Classic with System 6.0.7 back in the nineties. Like simplicity and rock solid OS and software. The classic Mac was, the nowadays is just overpriced and has FreeBSD as a base. I'll stick to the base and nothing else. FreeBSD to stay!
 
Jurassic park.
Not Yet , Solaris 11 will have full support until 2034. and extended support until 2037, SPARC servers will be manufactured by ORACLE and FUJITSU until about year 2030.
I can build you an 8 socket , 96 core , 768 threads server with 12 Terabytes RAM and 32 PCIe slots running at 4,35 GHz tomorrow.
if you deploy Oracle in-memory Enterprise 19c database on that machine it will beat most of the competition on database throughput.
It will be very expensive , but it will be very fast.
 
Not Yet , Solaris 11 will have full support until 2034. and extended support until 2037, SPARC servers will be manufactured by ORACLE and FUJITSU until about year 2030.
I can build you an 8 socket , 96 core , 768 threads server with 12 Terabytes RAM and 32 PCIe slots running at 4,35 GHz tomorrow.
if you deploy Oracle in-memory Enterprise 19c database on that machine it will beat most of the competition on database throughput.
It will be very expensive , but it will be very fast.
Dunno how that is a reply... Jurassic Park was rendered on SGI IRIX workstations in 1993. They had their own flavor of UNIX on them at the time. And SGI, while it doesn't exist as a company any more, they do have enthusiasts maintaining software repos for the IRIX unix, even to this day.
 
Back
Top