Unix and Me
Mon 23 April 2012
Unix and Me
Having a look through my career and history today brought back lots of memories. I remember my Father bringing home a commodore pet of course it was a family computer much like the atari games console. But of course me being me tended to use it more that most I dont recall the date when it arrived but I remember that after many weeks programming this in fact it could have been many months we got introduced to a guy that designed and made computer games for arcades. He was a great guy and was also a radio amateur enthusiast but anyhow he wanted a commadore pet and he swapped it with me for a brand new commadore 64 think that was around 1982-83 not 100%. There was various computers broiught home after that but the one that remains in my mind was the amiga 500 that was around 1987. The love with the amiga was a life long thing and 3 years later I bought an amiga 1500 with my summer vacation work money!! It was a proud day my first personal computer bought with my hard earned cash.. From this date forth I was constenelty using the CLI of the workbench and tought myself 68000 assembler and C language. I tinktered alot with software and was interested in Unix (amiga being loosely based on it) I managed to minix running on the Amiga and it was until I studied for my qualifications that I understood the potential. We studined unix using old hpux main frame and terminal we also used PC’s with dos for learning pascal and C but I was always facinated with Unix. The in about 91-92 I down loaded some code from the internet that I happend to cath on a BBS system I struggle getting it to work as I only had an amiga and I was trying to get it to work with the PC emulater (hardware based). Needless to say I needed a PC.. so I built one.. By the time I had the bits and pieces to run this system properly Slackware was just available, I remember downloading this via ftpmail it took ages but compared with cassette tape ;) Anyhow..Slackware was installed Around 1991-1993 I passed my amateur radio examination fuelled by the need to use and abuse packet radio of which I did. I then became a TCP/IP over Ax25 BBS providing tcpip services including mail in and around Suffolk. 1994 I was basically forced to use DOS as most of the equipment I was using on a day to day basis was DOS I followed DOS the Dos to windows then windows 95. All of this time using unix as a personal platform. I was introuduced to many different types of unix platforms and have experimented with most.