On 07/20/2010 11:17 AM, A Nonny Moose wrote:
Thanks, Bryan. I'll bet there was a time when we could have made beautiful scripts together. I learned UNIX when I was working on staff at the University of Waterloo for a couple of years. I needed a break. This was in 1980, and when I left, I went back to sales support on main frames, so there wasn't much scripting there. When I started out, the Byte hadn't been invented by the It Beats Me company. That happened the year we were evaluating the first main frame for the bank I was working for at the time. The I've Been Moved company interfered with the board of directors and got a year's delay so they could announce the /360, but it didn't do any good. We now really needed the machine, and the /360 wasn't deliverable at the time of the announcement. We went with NCR because they had a lot of American banks already and had drivers we needed for the cheque sorters. So, I go back a long, long way. Microcomputers? What? You've got to be kidding. [Laughing]
My first computer was a PC clone with the Intel 8088 processor. Glorified calculator. It had two 5.25" floppy drives. Later, I expanded and put in a 5.25" HDD with 20MB. 20MB! (-:
I learned scripting GW-Basic on that thing when I was 13 years. I only discovered that language because my Dad got a huge batch of free software and public domain stuff from the nearby University, and I quite liked a version of the game Star Trek that was implemented in GW-Basic. At the time, I didn't know what a complier or build system was or that I needed one, so I never discovered DJGPP. Microsoft certainly wasn't telling tales and didn't include a build system with their limey DOS. Instead I became on artist and studied drawing, painting, sculpture, aesthetics, art history, etc etc.
About eight years or so ago, I got back into computers during the XP era. Shortly thereafter which I discovered Debian Sarge, and made my first GNU+Linux installation. I escaped Microsoft forever and used Debian based systems for a few years. Due to a mixture of their politics and packaging system, I switched to Archlinux and have used nothing else since. Now I work as a support consultant for an international free software developer and I am designing a custom build system to create GNU+Linux from Source Code (GLFSC). (-:
Now I am a full time free software programmer/support tech who can draw or paint anything he sees or imagines. Funny how the world works, no?
