[ Thanks to Skaven for this link.
]
“Then a message said “Loading vmlinuz…”. Damn. The welcome
screen wasn’t Linux yet. And whatever ‘vmlinuz’ was, it was big. I
figured it must have been the equivalent of io.sys and msdos.sys
(which I later learned is called the ‘kernel’ of the operating
system).”
“Loads of text went by so quickly I didn’t know what to make of
it. For the first time in many years, I felt helpless in front of
my own PC. PageUp/PageDown didn’t work. There was no command
prompt. Just loads and loads of text scrolling intermittently. But
this was not the usual kind of helplessness. Hidden behind this
helplessness was hope.”
“This was Linux. This was the thing that would supposedly
turn my PC into big iron. I wouldn’t have to scrounge around the
department UNIX servers for scraps anymore. My PC would BECOME the
UNIX servers. And as far as my PC was concerned, I was its
God. I would be master of the big iron, and the big iron would be
my slave. I would have the source code, the blueprints to the
entire system. I would be able to know it to the guts and bone. I
would become its architect. The wisdom of the ancients would be
made available to me without limit.”