5 ms·

I'm super grateful to my dad for having let my hands near a computer at a time (late 80s, 90s) when computers were super expensive in India (they cost like a ye

by sriku 7y ago

I'm super grateful to my dad for having let my hands near a computer at a time (late 80s, 90s) when computers were super expensive in India (they cost like a year's pay for a fresh grad back then). We couldn't afford one, but he took me to meet people who did and who showed me fascinating stuff like synthesizing sounds. I still recall my first "short circuit" on seeing a BASIC program that read "I = I + 1" and freaking out with "that's not possible". My dad's University got a computer to help work with Indian languages (wonderful work on hardware and software for Tamil, Telugu, Devanagari done by research teams at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing Pune in the pre-unicode days). Still in high school, I got to help around organizing the library of the Indian Music Department. Later on, I wrote my own cataloging software in Emacs Lisp that kept details in a plain text file. Playing around with Slackware Linux in the early 90s definitely gave the feeling of being part of something big.

lqet 7y ago
> I still recall my first "short circuit" on seeing a BASIC program that read "I = I + 1" and freaking out with "that's not possible". Ha, for me it was the opposite: growing up in the 90ies before Internet, my dad bought a cheap old DOS computer for the entire family on which I experimented with .bat scripting and then discovered by accident the user manual of BASIC, which was included with DOS at the time. So I was familiar with "=" as an assignment operator for variables way before I really learned about variables in school. Because of this, it took me a while to get my head around solve-for-x equations in school, but I never had any problems with the f(x) = x^2 notation, because, after all, it worked exactly like a BASIC function, and I would freak out teachers and classmate because I immediately wondered whether something like f(x, y, z) exists in math. On the other hand, I tried teaching a classmate Visual Basic in the early 2000s, and he had the exact reaction after seeing "x = x + 1": he declared that "this is impossible and makes no sense".
hiram112 7y ago
> Playing around with Slackware Linux in the early 90s definitely gave the feeling of being part of something big. Slackware in the late 90s is what got me hooked on Linux and computing in general, along with building my own AMD Sempron (i.e. inexpensive) machine from a bunch of mostly random parts I'd buy off Craigslist. At one point in time, I knew what every single file in 'etc' was for, what every single process was, and every single listening port. I feel bad for the younger kids learning Linux in 2019 with Centos or Ubuntu. The systems are so much more complicated, it's difficult to understand how everything is put together. Might as well be a black box like Windows or Mac.
- peatmoss 7y ago
  OpenBSD. If you want to cut your teeth on “comprehensible unix” it’s a high water mark. Reading the man pages is probably worth a few years of sysadmin experience. I too was a Slackware user of the 90s, but I was also a BSD user. OpenBSD is simply great, and has only gotten better—not more magical.
HNLurker2 7y ago
Booring

by sriku 7y ago

lqet 7y ago

> I still recall my first "short circuit" on seeing a BASIC program that read "I = I + 1" and freaking out with "that's not possible". Ha, for me it was the opposite: growing up in the 90ies before Internet, my dad bought a cheap old DOS computer for the entire family on which I experimented with .bat scripting and then discovered by accident the user manual of BASIC, which was included with DOS at the time. So I was familiar with "=" as an assignment operator for variables way before I really learned about variables in school. Because of this, it took me a while to get my head around solve-for-x equations in school, but I never had any problems with the f(x) = x^2 notation, because, after all, it worked exactly like a BASIC function, and I would freak out teachers and classmate because I immediately wondered whether something like f(x, y, z) exists in math. On the other hand, I tried teaching a classmate Visual Basic in the early 2000s, and he had the exact reaction after seeing "x = x + 1": he declared that "this is impossible and makes no sense".

hiram112 7y ago

> Playing around with Slackware Linux in the early 90s definitely gave the feeling of being part of something big. Slackware in the late 90s is what got me hooked on Linux and computing in general, along with building my own AMD Sempron (i.e. inexpensive) machine from a bunch of mostly random parts I'd buy off Craigslist. At one point in time, I knew what every single file in 'etc' was for, what every single process was, and every single listening port. I feel bad for the younger kids learning Linux in 2019 with Centos or Ubuntu. The systems are so much more complicated, it's difficult to understand how everything is put together. Might as well be a black box like Windows or Mac.

peatmoss 7y ago
OpenBSD. If you want to cut your teeth on “comprehensible unix” it’s a high water mark. Reading the man pages is probably worth a few years of sysadmin experience. I too was a Slackware user of the 90s, but I was also a BSD user. OpenBSD is simply great, and has only gotten better—not more magical.

HNLurker2 7y ago

Booring