I must have been in high school five year ealier - there were no computers in school then. Later I did use many of the same systems described in the article - IBM 360, PDP 11, Data General Nova, DEC System 10, VAX - plus several others (e.g., Multics). I wasn't concerned particularly about open source software, but hardware was a different story. One machine I used - I think it was called a Fabritek MP-12 (a clone of a PDP-8) - came with scant written documentation about its operation, but it did come with circuit diagrams. Bingo! I was in there with a soldering iron swapping components to speed it up. Today's computers are behind sealed walls in comparison. On the MP-12 one loaded the bootstrap program through switches. Today you might be locked out entirely with this "secure boot" feature permanently enabled. Computing freedom requires eternal vigilance.
My first Linux install (1996) actually went quite smoothly. Most recently I installed Debian. It's just like Ubuntu except without the Ubuntu junk that nobody wants anyway. Imagine that.
I guess my path was a little different from others here, since I started with key punches, teletypes, and selectrics, and thought that the most awesome invention was the character terminal (this was before the VT100). I was using Linux before even seeing Win95 (which I never used), and for many years Linux (and perhaps FreeBSD) was the only preemptive multitasking operating system available on a laptop that supported "plug-' n-play" with PC cards. Maybe there were others I'm not aware of.
That comment regarding the time evolution of FreeBSD v. Linux is great - haven't seen such a straightforward comparison of the two before.
I must have been in high school five year ealier - there were no computers in school then. Later I did use many of the same systems described in the article - IBM 360, PDP 11, Data General Nova, DEC System 10, VAX - plus several others (e.g., Multics). I wasn't concerned particularly about open source software, but hardware was a different story. One machine I used - I think it was called a Fabritek MP-12 (a clone of a PDP-8) - came with scant written documentation about its operation, but it did come with circuit diagrams. Bingo! I was in there with a soldering iron swapping components to speed it up. Today's computers are behind sealed walls in comparison. On the MP-12 one loaded the bootstrap program through switches. Today you might be locked out entirely with this "secure boot" feature permanently enabled. Computing freedom requires eternal vigilance.
My first Linux install (1996) actually went quite smoothly. Most recently I installed Debian. It's just like Ubuntu except without the Ubuntu junk that nobody wants anyway. Imagine that.