Linux Stories

The Lovesong of Arne W. Flones

The picture on the cover of the April, 1975 issue of Popular Electronics started a revolution. The Altair 8800 Computer was available in kit form for $439.00, for which you received a CPU board, the S-100 backplane (in which to plug the CPU board), a power supply and a chassis. The chassis looked sexy, lots of blinking red lights and switches. For another hundred bucks you could purchase a 256 byte memory card. [It's not a typo: a whole quarter of a K!] If you bought one of these, you ended up with a computer which couldn't do much, but you were probably the first on the block to own one. It was fun.

Instead of an Altair I ended up buying a Heathkit Microprocessor Trainer. Remarkably, it's still available. It featured the same 256 bytes of memory as the original Altair, but had a Motorola processor instead of an Intel. With this little guy I learned computer hardware interfacing. I also hacked my first machine code on it. It was fun.

By the end of the 1970's, computers were catching on. I bought an Apple II at the height of its popularity. You could do a lot with that little 48K machine. It ran VisiCalc and UCSD Pascal. It was fun.

I'm not sure when things stopped being fun, but it happened. Maybe it was because computers went big business when IBM introduced the IBM PC. Maybe it was because I had been down-sized too many times. I'm not sure when exactly it happened, but sometime between the early 80's and the mid-1990's, computers stopped being fun for me.

About three years ago, I picked up my first Linux distribution -- Slackware -- and installed it on one of my computers. I had been a UNIX user, but never a UNIX administrator. Installing and configuring this new thing was frustrating and challenging. Every day as I put my newly learned administrator skills to the test, the triumphs came more often. As my experience grew, so did my confidence--and my bookshelf space devoted to O'Reilly. I don't remember when it happened, but one day it dawned on me that the feeling of the good ol' days was back.

Maybe it's the sense of community. Maybe it's learning new things. Or just maybe opening the source code has awakened an industry which has been sleeping in the shadow of a repressive giant. For me, there is a sense of wonder in all this. From tasks as mundane as making more room by repartitioning a hard drive to configuring Sendmail, it's exciting. In spite of the fact that I've been messing with computers for decades, every day something is new and different. I'm havin' a ball.

As my major tasks are developing software and writing articles for the Internet, my little SOHO (small office/home office) network is a work forever in progress. Every week I try to accomplish another task or two from my Network todo list, which is long enough now that I will probably never get to its end. And like I Love Lucy in a candy factory, there are always more things added than are taken off.

There is one computer in the house; there are two in the office behind the house. All are connected together with ethernet and to the Internet via a digital subscriber line (DSL). Everybody in the family uses the computer in the house; I use the two in the office. My cat, Rosina, also holds court in the office. She thinks the computers are there only as her personal bun warmers.

It is on this base which I will build these weekly columns. Drawing on my experiences I will tell a new story relating to Linux each week. Hopefully you will find them both entertaining and informative.

Linux makes computers fun again.

Citations