Linux for Life!

The first time I used "Linux" was back in high school. It was a FreeBSD system on a high-end PC. At that time, I didn’t understand the OS, or why it was installed on an expensive PC. I spoke to my electronics teacher and decided to learn more about FreeBSD.

FreeBSD definitely wasn't like MS-DOS.

The following year my high school received a very expensive Sun SPARC "pizza box", and the Sun Microsystems' people gave me a chance to attend, incognito, a couple of training sessions meant for the teachers:

• Lesson #1: The system was built to never be turned off. So don't just unplug it.
• Lesson #2: The system would never crash...

Fast forward to college I started taking Unix/Linux administration and programming courses, C, C++, TCL/TK, as well as, Windows programming, Visual C++ and Visual BASIC. I was an avid Windows user and programmer. I even purchased a Microsoft MSDN library subscription.

By 1999, I decided to run Redhat Linux on my brand-new high-end PC, and keep my old PC for Windows. My fellow college students all thought I was crazy to use a high-end PC for Linux.

When Windows 2000 went Gold (before being released to the public) I had racked up many months of using Redhat Linux as my main go-to daily-driver OS, but at long last Windows 2000 was gold. I spent an entire weekend moving to a fresh install of Windows 2000.

I really put everything into getting the newer and better Windows 2000 up and running with my programs, favorite apps and utilities, Office, VC++, VB, Simply Accounting, and Microfocus COBOL.

Yes, COBOL for Windows is a thing.

After about a month of using Windows 2000 I came to the conclusion that it really didn't cut the mustard. It became clear to me that a POSIX-like OS was my way forward and I never looked back. Today I primary use Hardened Gentoo Linux, and MacOS - Windows is just that OS that one has to make do with because it is what it is.

Since 1999, I have gained experience all the way from a SGI Origin 2000 super computer, thousands of CPUs processing clusters, various massive IBM Unix mainframes, Sun servers with SPARC CPUs, SGI Indy, Apple Macs, Sun thin-clients, all the way down to very tiny embedded Linux devices. Linux really is for Life - and POSIX too.