A Few Questions For Jaldhar H. Vyas

“Growing up in the ’70s we were told computers were great. if
you had any problem you could just say “let’s ask the
computer!” and Sentinel One or whoever would appear as a
hologram and instantly tell you the answer. Or maybe they were
lovable wisecracking robots. But we were lied to. Real computers
turned out to be neither lovable nor cute and they maddeningly
refused to do what they were told for incomprehensible reasons.
From the very beginning I had the urge to take the lid off and try
to understand what was going on in these mysterious boxes in the
hopes of somehow beating them into submission.

“Way back in college in the early ’90s I managed to stumble
across the Internet (just in time for the dot-com boom.) Naturally
I wanted to learn more about it and how it worked and that meant
learning Unix. Even if you used Windows, you used ports of Unix
software so there was no way around it. The trouble is Unix was
expensive and ran on exotic hardware far beyond the purchasing
power of a destitute student. Thus when I heard that there was a
free clone of Unix that could run on a 386 pc, I was very
interested. When I learned it came with full source code that you
could tinker with as much as you wished it was like a dream come
true. So I cleared up some space on my massive 40MB hard drive for
a version of Slackware which was the only decent distribution at
the time.”

Complete
Story