Seldom without a computer of some sort since graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1978, I have been a full-time Linux user since 2005, a full-time Solaris and SunOS user from 1986 through 2005, and UNIX System V user before that.
On the technical side of things, I have spent a great deal of my career as a consultant, doing data analysis and visualization; especially spatial data analysis. I have a substantial amount of related programming experience, using C, awk, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, PostGIS and lately Groovy. I'm looking at Julia with great interest. I have also built a few desktop and web-based applications, primarily in Java and lately in Grails with lots of JavaScript on the front end and PostgreSQL as my database of choice.
Aside from that, I spend a considerable amount of time writing proposals, technical reports and - of course - stuff on https://www.opensource.com.
Authored Comments
Yes Seth!!!! Compute like it's 1989 indeed! Great article, thanks for the stroll down memory lane...
My computing in 1989 was a Sun 3/60, Motorola 68020; was it 4MB RAM? I think so.... 141MB hard drive. The whole point of the SunView windowing system (no it wasn't X, not then) was to let me have more than one terminal window open at the same time...
I was mostly programming in Sun Pascal though somewhat in C. Plus a lot of throw-away stuff in awk and csh. It all worked pretty well, though the graphics on the monochrome displays were a bit jaggy.
We had a Usenet connection but no Internet, just a local Ethernet LAN. IIRC three 3/60s and three 3/50s (those ran diskless with one of the 3/60s acting as an NFS server).
And wow that stuff was expensive by today's standards.
Thank you for your comments, Rob Smart.
I have certainly invested some time in this music hobby, though whether I am getting the best is open to (spirited) argument! But I'm pretty happy with it.
I think I have answered some of your questions in an earlier article I wrote on home music servers, ALSA, configuration, etc. Please take a look here:
https://opensource.com/life/16/1/how-set-linux-based-music-server-home
The only substantial change I have made since that article is moving from Volumio to Archphile. The music serving software is still MPD and I still control MPD mostly with MPDroid on my Android phone.
The nice thing about the chain I use (ARM-based dedicated computer, lightweight Linux distro, MPD with bit-perfect ALSA connection to inexpensive high-quality digital-analog converter all connected to the home stereo) is that it is easy to configure and use and sounds great, without burning a huge hole in the bank account.
Also, because the player is dedicated, its use and function is not affected by normal computing chores, conflicts with other software requirements, etc.
If you have any other questions after you read that article, please write back!