Dave Hinz wrote:


As far as the retro ****ing match, Dad had a Heathkit dumb terminal he
and I (mostly he) built, and a 150 baud acoustic coupler

110 baud maybe? ISTR that the speed was made to correspond with the
tty (teletype) systems of the day?

Yeah, 110. My bad.

to play around on that thing. OK, I broke into the grocery store
computer.
I'm so cool. Now what am I going to do? Put filet mignon on special?
LOL! The sort of cool part was I did it (broke into the computer where
Dad worked) by whistling into the phone.

Well, "broke into" for values of "got the modem to think I had data to
give it", but yeah.

Well, I mean I whistled his password. Or something. I got right in there
man, with all the illicit power of a script kiddie just dying to get into a
grocery store price database and wreak havok. Then I hung up and walked
away before Dad could whoop my ass for messing with his terminal thingie.

You know, a lot of folks I know who have turned into Unix admins got our
start on the CoCo. I wonder what the correlation is there.

Probably the tinker factor. I wasn't the active tinkerer so much as Dad in
those days, being only like eight or something, but we tinkered. We put
more RAM in than it was supposed to have, we twiddled something and burned
a new EPROM so it could print lowercase characters, we burned some other
EPROM to let it read both sides of a double sided disk and stuff.

With PCs there was still some tinker factor in the early days. Jiggle this
and twiddle that to get a few extra bytes of RAM to make this other work,
and stuff like that, and you usta could get a compiler for less than $500
for even more tinkering. Then by about Windows 95 they had worked really
hard to get rid of all the tinker factor. You can root around in the
Registry if you really want to, but it's not fun. It's hard to twiddle
around with Windows and make it truly your own. Some of that is a good
thing in some ways, but it's often a bad thing too, because it's such a
bitch to get in and fix something when it breaks.

Not so Linux. It's a tinkerer's dream. All the tinkering you could ever
want, and when you're not in the mood to tinker, most everything usually
just works. It's rare anymore, especially in the last year or so, to HAVE
to tinker with it if you don't feel like it.

I can't speak for Unix more generally, but that's one of the things that
really drew me to Linux initially. It put the joy back into computing. I
have mostly gotten over the joy, and am more likely just to accept out of
the box defaults these days. I can have it both ways, and I love that.

--
Michael McIntyre ---- Silvan
Linux fanatic, and certified Geek; registered Linux user #243621
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/
http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/