[OT] What holiday is everyone celebrating?

[Terence McCarthy]

On Wed, 20 Oct 2004 17:59:05 -0500
Tom Jandl <tom at jandlnet.com> wrote:
> One less family member calling me with broken Microsoft problems is a plus.

One more for Linux is a double plus.

I'm 50s too, been messing about with computers since the 48k Sinclair Spectrum, Acorn BBC Model 2, Commodore PET, then a Ferranti 8086, before climbing the series to my current Athlons.

After the totally amazing experiences of having a 5.5 inch drive instead of a tape recorder, installing a WD 20Mb "Hard Card" (formatted as two partitions as M$ didn't recognise anything as large!), and seeing my first working mouse (M$ actually, bought in Hanover) eventually got bored with the M$ (limited) vision of computing and switched.

This was helped by having worked with main-frames, and playing with acoustic couplers almost at the start of the Web (London Uni, very early '80s when doing my Master's). Incidently, using the 'phone to pass the same information aurally would have been a damn sight faster!

Some work later with a couple of HP mainframes (which, amongst other things, did Path Profile Analysis for area comms in BAOR), and DEC minis.

Now using only Linux (mainly SuSE) at home and work and converting people as I go. My latest venture is my daughter's new flatmates at uni, (both, as we speak, or rather, as I write, are curled up in Sarah's room expressing delight and surprise at the power and flexibility of Linux and particularly Xine playing "Hero" on DVD!

On the 'phone I talked her through setting up net-working and cable access in under ten minutes from switching on - are they impressed with Linux! (One of the girls' father spent hours trying to get XP to use the cable modem).

I've given them a Knoppix disc to play with and I'll try to get them to dual boot later......

I'm sure they won't get as much excitement out of the development of computing as I've had (and am having). In the same way my generation took cars, radio, and television for granted. Yeah, I've now got digital radio and TV, but so what?

Sorry for banging on, if any of you reach this far. : )

Terence