[ Thanks to Zack
Brown for this link. ]
“The picture on the cover of the April, 1975 issue of Popular
Electronics started a revolution. The Altair 8800 Computer was
available in kit form for $439.00, for which you received a CPU
board, the S-100 backplane (in which to plug the CPU board), a
power supply and a chassis. The chassis looked sexy, lots of
blinking red lights and switches. For another hundred bucks you
could purchase a 256 byte memory card. [It’s not a typo: a whole
quarter of a K!] If you bought one of these, you ended up with a
computer which couldn’t do much, but you were probably the first on
the block to own one. It was fun.”
“Instead of an Altair I ended up buying a Heathkit
Microprocessor Trainer. Remarkably, it’s still available. It
featured the same 256 bytes of memory as the original Altair, but
had a Motorola processor instead of an Intel. With this little guy
I learned computer hardware interfacing. I also hacked my first
machine code on it. It was fun….”
“About three years ago, I picked up my first Linux distribution
— Slackware — and installed it on one of my computers. I had been
a UNIX user, but never a UNIX administrator. Installing and
configuring this new thing was frustrating and challenging. Every
day as I put my newly learned administrator skills to the test, the
triumphs came more often. As my experience grew, so did my
confidence–and my bookshelf space devoted to O’Reilly. I don’t
remember when it happened, but one day it dawned on me that the
feeling of the good ol’ days was back.“