Old farts and new Linux

Zoltan Boszormenyi zboszor at freemail.hu
Tue May 4 15:53:51 UTC 2004


John Nichel írta:
> T. Ribbrock wrote:
> 
>> Well, I got the impression that especially the (technical) folks who are
>> 30-40 now have more of a tendency to know what computers actually *are*.
>> I'm 35 now and "my generation" was the one that started off on VIC20s (I
>> did), Sinclairs or even self-built Z80/6502 machines. Most of us would
>> have gotten their hands dirty on assembler at some point and also would
>> have been used to the command line right from the start. The younger
>> folks seem to be spoiled by the "GUI-it-all" virus that spread later...
>> ;-) As such, especially the technical folks my age seem to have the
>> openess and knowledge needed to try other stuff.
>>
>> Cheerio,
>>
>> Thomas (first Unix experience 1991 at university, Linux user since RHL4.1
>>         - I think 1997)

Happy days of assembler... I scared my parents by writing
an IRQ handler for the vertical retrace interrupt
on my Sinclair - inverted the screen colors at
every 1/50 second. :-)

I have made my assembler teacher to almost blush
by writing smarter and shorter routines (that did the
same as his) before my classmates.
Some of them were self-trained in assembly on different
microcomputers, too, before getting into the university.

I am only 31, have met Linux in 1993 - SLS distro (0.99 kernel)
then Slackware then RedHat 4.2(? I don't remember)
I am happy that I stuck with RedHat and saw it evolving.

> Back when your friends thought you were cool for....
> 
> 10 ECHO "Hello John";

Hm, that was PRINT. You must have forgot your BASIC skills. :-)
Some kids have been joking on me in the primary school reading
a BASIC manual - the hungarian word for f*ck sounds
slightly similar. :-D

> 20 GOTO 10
> RUN

I remember giving advices for the clueless such as:

10 NEW

Best regards,
Zoltán Böszörményi





More information about the fedora-list mailing list