Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Platform of Choice: Through the Years

It seemed like forever ago. Back in 1992, when I first became a member of the Upward Bound program at Case Western Reserve University during my sophomore year in high school, I first cut my computer networking teeth on a OS called System 7. If someone asked me what OS this Mac runs, I would look at them like they were crazy and say 'what other OSes are there for a Mac'? At the time, there were none...oh how 14 years can change things.

I was a loyal Mac person until I went to school at Allegheny College. There, they were users of the NeXT OS created by our good friend, Steve Jobs...and the hardware that went with it. The hardware SUCKED but the OS was secure, intuitive and user-friendly. It had cool things that I didn't realize the beauty of until now. I could go into command-line whenever I wanted, I could use Objective-C to code whatever I wanted. The web browser, while no Netscape 1.1, held its own. But the beauty of it was...it was UNIX. I couldn't ever go back to non-UNIX OSes now...

...then came Windows95 which messed up my world.

Then, one day, during my second tour at Allegheny, Glenn Buchholz (forgive me if I didn't spell your last name right, Glenn...I could just call you JAWSSSSSS, as Randy did but I digress...big ups to you guys!) gave a talk about...this UNIX...that you could put on a PC...it was called...Linux.

Holy Shit.


That day changed my life. I knew that, one day, me and Linux would eventually have to hook up. That day was during the summer of 1999. I bought my first parts from a computer and I bought a Linux book and wrestled with Caldera OpenLinux 1.2...and Windows 98, Second Edition. For the last 6 1/2 years, I haven't gone more than 2 weeks without a distro of Linux on one of my regular use machines.

Right now, my main machine has Win XP Pro and Kubuntu on a dual boot.

...but I am typing this on a Mac, running OS X.

Love is hard.

2 comments:

-Me said...

Allegheny?? Really? Class of '98.

derek said...

Well, if I had STAYED at Allegheny and finished on time, I would have been 1998 too.