On 04/09/2017 04:02 AM, Diesel wrote:


snip

Ahh. You're a bit older than myself. I got my start originally on the
green screen apples at the tender age of five. Moved onto the coco3,
and went into the world of Intel from there. Was *never* a mac
fanboy. And, didn't much care for those apples, either. Would have
preferred my first computer to be an Intel, but, I didn't buy the
first one, my grandmother did as a bday gift when I was eight years
old. It took me awhile to adjust from writing code on the apple to
the coco..Although both machines had BASIC on a rom chip, the
dialects didn't have that much in common. Borland assembler on the
coco was way different than what Apple's assembler was too. OS-9 was
a different beastie altogether; but it could actually multitask!
****ing incredible operating system for it's time, infact.

Ran my first BBS (spitfire v3.2) on a Tandy 3000NL-AT class machine.
(286 10megahertz) via a single 1.44 meg floppy disk with a 2400baud
zoom modem. Not only did the machine boot DOS v3.2 off of it, the
entire board ran on the same floppy. Beat the pants off the acoustic
coupler I had on my coco. Oh how I long for the days of tight
efficient code. It's almost's unheard of now.

I didn't have a HD at the time. I did get one a bit later though. a
friend gave me a 40meg drive that used a proprietary 8bit LONG ISA
controller card with the HD attached to the back of it. He pulled it
from his XT tandy 1000 series. I believe it was MFM, but, it could
have been an RLL. It was a long time ago.

It did not take me too long to get back into things and within six
months was quite used to win9x...so I needed a bigger challenge.

Windows 9x wasn't my first experience with Windows... I actually
started with Windows v1.0 (yes, v1.0), but, I preferred Desqview at
the time. Moved onto Windows 3.x, but it's time slicing abilities
sucked donkey dick for running a multi line board. And later, OS/2.
OS/2 warp beat the pants off Windows 3x AND 9x, but, IBM couldn't
advertise for ****. Most of my experience with linux was via shell
accounts, until I decided to run it local.

Have to admit I was clueless regarding Linux at first. From the
time I got my Red Hat 5.2 CD until the time I got it installed and
everything properly configured...was about six months...but I
learned a lot!

Aye.

Now Linux is very easy to install and use but to a newbie there
are still a few things that might be a little confusing...but for
the most part there is nothing to it.

I totally agree. It's come a very long ways!





What I did after I became familiar with Win9x and at the same time I was
trying to figure out Linux...

Started collecting vintage machines to make sure I got a good background
on all I missed during those years I stayed away from computers and did
fool with Win1 and up.

Got 8088's, 286's 386's and even a Kaypro running CP/M

Out of all my vintage machines I think the IBM PS-2 is my favorite,

It's a 486 33 mhz but runs Win95 great!

I also fooled with OS/2 and even have ECS running in a virtual machine
just for the heck of it