“I rather like my computer. With it, I’ve done a lot of stuff,
written a large quantity of material, hacked together several
programs, met people, participated in arguments, spent time
learning about and configuring programs. And I’ve spent many hours
wrestling with my own screwups. But in the end, I’ve come out a lot
more savvy about computing in general….”
“Since, in the various communities that I had ties with (the
Jihad to Destroy Barney and the BBSs that I still frequented),
there was a fairly large proportion of technical people, I quickly
became aware of a fair amount of buzz surrounding this nifty little
thing called “Linux” — a version of the old, outdated, stuffy,
mythical UNIX systems that were so often referred to in humour text
files. Curious, I eventually caved in to the pressure and
downloaded “zipslack,” a thirty megabyte UMSDOS Linux distribution
that, in hindsight, was a bad way to get started. About a week
later, I gave up in frustration at not being able to get it
installed properly.”
“As someone who tends to obsess fanatically about things in
general, and as someone who kept hearing good things about this
“Linux,” I kept with it, eventually managing to install it
(somewhat contrary to the instructions provided) on the second
partition that I had set aside earlier. I ls’d and rm’d and
pico’d, and all in all, was quite content with poking about and
learning new things about this interesting phenomenon of an
operating system. Since my only previous experience with Unix
before 1997 (before my student shell account) was with a dialup
Unix account that a local provider was giving away for free
(Uniserve, I think), this was a breath of fresh air. I was learning
things, transcending limits daily that the old DOS had imposed on
me, breathing fresh air, and seeing the potential of this
system.”