[Techtalk] Ancient history (mildly off topic) (was: What is "The Best NIC for Linux"?)

[Caitlyn M. Martin]

Julie wrote:

> "Caitlyn M. Martin" wrote:
> >
> > "Jennifer S. Davis" wrote:
> >
> > > Wow, 20 years as a geek.....
> >
> > Errr... I won a Systems Programming award in 1977, so I think I have her
beat.
> > All that means is that I'm older than Julie.  I'm certainly not smarter.
>
> I think we're dealing with "people who don't remember when LBJ was
> president" ;-)

<LOL>  I remember my uncle and aunt taking me to an LBJ rally early in the 1968
presidential campaign, before he withdrew.  It was on Flatbush Avenue in
Brooklyn,
basically a Jewish ghetto back then.  I was all of seven :)  I was very excited
to
actually see the President in person.

> > I also realized that this month makes six years since I was introduced to
Linux,
> > specifically Red Hat 3.0.3.  I didn't think much of it at the time, which
proves
> > just how stupid I can be :)  I still have my copy of Red Hat 4.0 on the
shelf,
> > too.
>
> I was futzing around with my root partition last night and
> realized that this month makes 20 years using UNIX.

I was a late-comer to UNIX, really getting started with it in 1995 when I ended
up
with secondary responsibility over some HP-9000 series boxes.  My professional
start
was back when distributed computing using proprietary minicomputers with their
own
proprietary operating systems was all the rage.  It was Datapoint equipment, and

I programmed in Databus (a proprietary language, now long dead) and also did
some
device drivers in SNAP/2, which was Datapoint assembler code.  I did my first
programming in C, writing control software for an early voicemail system, in
1985-86.

The first programming I did, period, was in a junior high gifted program, and it
was
BASIC, which seemed to be where everyone started in the 70s.  It was completely
unstructured, of course.  I went on to Fortran and Algol in high school.  I
remember
trying to write modular, structured code in BASIC and getting completely and
totally
frustrated with the language.

> I still remember the day I heard about this "thing called
> Linux -- some people have re-written UNIX and are selling
> it over the internet."

:)

I remember mostly agreeing with my boss in 1995 that all that would be left of
UNIX by 2005 would be TCP/IP, and that Microsoft would completely take over once
they
got an enterprise-ready, stable version of NT together.  Yeah, right.  Like I
said,
I was stupid.  The only point of disagreement was that I thought OS/2 still had
a
future.  Gee... this sounds awfully silly in retrospect.  Oddly enough, it was
that
same boss that forced me to start learning and working with  HP-UX.  It was also
the
network coordinator there that introduced me to the Linux system she had on her
desktop  very late that year,  She had Red Hat with CDE (commercial, of course)
as
her wm.

> Oh and this conversation --
>
> "What programming language do you use?"
> "C."
> "You mean COBOL?"
> "No, C."
> "How do you spell that?"
> "C."

:)  That gifted program I mentioned... we had access to an old Digital PDP-8.
It had
B on it.  Not C, but it's predecessor, which really was called B.

> And of course -- having a professor tell me "C is an unstructured
> language and not good for anything."  It's paid the bills for, oh,
> about 18 years ...

:)

All the best,
Caity