A rant from an old user

Kern · 2016-07-21 21:21:52

Just a nod from another old far... uuh old-timer, similar OS experience to loserMcLoser

Starting to looking like a 4 Yorkshiremen sketch

"Windows? You were lucky to have Win 3.11! We had to make do with DOS 6.0 and we were grateful ! "
"DOS 6.0 would have been heaven to us!
"DOS? we were ecstatic to be upgraded to an Amstrad..."
"Amstrad? at least you had a proper floppy drive, we had to beg our dad for a cassette recorder so we could load things on to our Spectrum "
...

Aside, always had some sort of *nix running since redhat 4 or 5.blob (on a 486 DX2 66 with a whopping 8MB RAM and 256MB hd begad)
Can't remember how/where/why I got Arch but I did, and liked it.. seem to remember the competition back then was Gentoo and I wasn't over fond of it either, with the compile times and the jokes about zOMG performance tweaks.
Tried Mandrake and (loved the typo above) "S'kackware", Knoppix and a few others too.
Favourite was to be Arch though.

Sadly, to my embarrassment, I stayed mainly with Windows as quite a bit of my work hardware required it to operate, and sadly still does.
But .... Win 10. enough is enough. When folks start coming to me to "fix" newly bought gear... Windows be damned.

The now mainstream Linux distro's, for me, have pandered to the excesses of eyecandy and bloat in order to make Linux more accessible.
I am overjoyed to see Arch in such good shape and have resisted the many calls in the early days to make things easier to install, favouring the KISS approach and providing support to those who want to test the waters.
"Teach a man to fish..." and so on.

So, here I am again, brandishing a new fangled DVD with the new pointy topped Arch logo, hoping the newer and brighter of you will forgive the inevitable dumb question from time to time.
Long live Arch.

K

Texbrew · 2016-07-22 02:10:30

Well said, Kern. I enjoyed your post.

So, here I am again, brandishing a new fangled DVD with the new pointy topped Arch logo,

Just curious, where'd you get the DVD?

tex

Kern · 2016-07-22 08:04:03

Tex,
thanks for the kind comment and sorry to unwittingly mislead. I just grabbed the ISO and wrote it to blank DVD.
The miser in me see's very little difference in price between CD and DVD so i get a pack of the latter as it covers more bases.
The new fangled bit was with a wry reference to me being an old fart and still having quite a bit of old tech laying around.
DVD sure beats having to load Arch up via cassette recorder

K

librett0 · 2016-07-22 15:20:04

Hi everyone,

Long time lurker here, but I've been an Arch user since 2007-ish.

Arch was the first Linux distribution I really 'stuck' with. I first tried Mandrake, but had some issues with modem drivers I didn't know how to solve at the time, so returned to Windows for a few years. Then Ubuntu Warty came out, so I tried it, hated it, and returned to Windows for a few years. Then I tried Gentoo, cried myself to sleep, and returned to Windows. Finally, I tried Arch, and everything made sense to me. Been here ever since.

I also want to note that I was a high-school dropout without much future at the time. Thanks to Arch, I gained system administration skills I probably wouldn't have with other OSes. Now I'm a "DevOps Engineer" (sorry for the buzzword). If it weren't for Arch, I'd probably still be flipping burgers.

Texbrew · 2016-07-23 01:16:13

Kern wrote:

The new fangled bit was with a wry reference to me being an old fart and still having quite a bit of old tech laying around.
DVD sure beats having to load Arch up via cassette recorder
K

I guess old tech is a relative term... I have one old PC, an HP Compaq circa 2004-2005, on which I did my first bare metal Arch Linux install.

I had a couple of even older PC's running linux, but I decided to dismantle & recycle them - not an easy decision for me, but it needed to be done.

As to DVD's versus cassette tapes, my first computer was a Timex Sinclair (1000 or 2000, don't remember), a tiny thing about the size of an old school digital calculator, 2Kb RAM, plugged into a portable black & white TV. I wrote & saved BASIC programs to a cassette recorder. Pretty useless, really, but it sparked an interest in computers.

Cheers,

tex

Texbrew · 2016-07-23 01:20:18

librett0 wrote:

I also want to note that I was a high-school dropout without much future at the time. Thanks to Arch, I gained system administration skills I probably wouldn't have with other OSes. Now I'm a "DevOps Engineer" (sorry for the buzzword). If it weren't for Arch, I'd probably still be flipping burgers.

That's a very strong case for learning about computers.

Congratulations on your accomplishment. I hope you enjoy your work.

Cheers,

tex

ewaller · 2016-07-23 01:37:03

Texbrew wrote:

Kern wrote:
The new fangled bit was with a wry reference to me being an old fart and still having quite a bit of old tech laying around.
DVD sure beats having to load Arch up via cassette recorder
K
I guess old tech is a relative term... I have one old PC, an HP Compaq circa 2004-2005, on which I did my first bare metal Arch Linux install.
I had a couple of even older PC's running linux, but I decided to dismantle & recycle them - not an easy decision for me, but it needed to be done.
As to DVD's versus cassette tapes, my first computer was a Timex Sinclair (1000 or 2000, don't remember), a tiny thing about the size of an old school digital calculator, 2Kb RAM, plugged into a portable black & white TV. I wrote & saved BASIC programs to a cassette recorder. Pretty useless, really, but it sparked an interest in computers.
Cheers,
tex

Hey, I learned by storing on paper tape hung on ASR-33 Teletypes at 110 Baud. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_tape
My record here may only go back to 2009, but my Gentoo record goes back to 2005 https://forums.gentoo.org/profile.php?m … e&u=115736
I was on Slackware for a couple years before that, but I cannot prove it

Last edited by ewaller (2016-07-23 01:37:23)

Texbrew · 2016-07-23 08:57:30

@ewaller:

I bookmarked this page to read your links later, especially your gentoo forum page.

Wow... paper tape, teletype and 110 baud modems. Makes me wonder, university study or workplace?

This discussion makes me want to go into much greater detail about my early days computer learning and hobby, but I will refrain from that for now.

Thanks for the memories that have been stirred.

tex

ewaller · 2016-07-23 14:50:17

Texbrew wrote:

Wow... paper tape, teletype and 110 baud modems. Makes me wonder, university study or workplace?

Believe it or not, Middle School and High School. Los Angeles Unified had a Microdata computer with dial in modems. All of the high schools and middle schools in the area has ASR-33s to dial into it. It ran BASIC that was very similar to Dartmouth BASIC. The man (Tony) who was responsible for the computer was one of those very special teachers -- on saturdays, he opened (on his own time) the Math lab at the school and everyone interested from the surrounding schools were welcome to go in and work directly on the machine -- with CRT terminals and a high speed paper tape reader/punch. The system had a disk drive, but Microdata never came through on the promised DOS for it. So, using the MIT hacker culture as a model, Tony turned us loose. After a couple years, we (a group of about 10 of us, mostly guys senior to me) were able to patch the system to save programs to disk and load them back. It was very crude, but it worked. After I went to university, the system fell into disuse with the rise of 8 bit micros, but I would still stop by occasionally and help Tony bring it back up until the system was decommissioned in about 1982.

x33a · 2016-07-23 18:30:30

librett0 wrote:

I also want to note that I was a high-school dropout without much future at the time. Thanks to Arch, I gained system administration skills I probably wouldn't have with other OSes. Now I'm a "DevOps Engineer" (sorry for the buzzword). If it weren't for Arch, I'd probably still be flipping burgers.

That's awesome to hear. It is kind of similar to my own experience with Linux and Arch.

Texbrew · 2016-07-23 19:35:15

ewaller wrote:

Texbrew wrote:
Wow... paper tape, teletype and 110 baud modems. Makes me wonder, university study or workplace?
Believe it or not, Middle School and High School. Los Angeles Unified had a Microdata computer with dial in modems. All of the high schools and middle schools in the area has ASR-33s to dial into it. It ran BASIC that was very similar to Dartmouth BASIC. The man (Tony) who was responsible for the computer was one of those very special teachers -- on saturdays, he opened (on his own time) the Math lab at the school and everyone interested from the surrounding schools were welcome to go in and work directly on the machine -- with CRT terminals and a high speed paper tape reader/punch. The system had a disk drive, but Microdata never came through on the promised DOS for it. So, using the MIT hacker culture as a model, Tony turned us loose. After a couple years, we (a group of about 10 of us, mostly guys senior to me) were able to patch the system to save programs to disk and load them back. It was very crude, but it worked. After I went to university, the system fell into disuse with the rise of 8 bit micros, but I would still stop by occasionally and help Tony bring it back up until the system was decommissioned in about 1982.

Eric,

I stand in awe, sir. This reminds me of a passage in Neal Stephenson's essay, "In the Beginning was the Command Line" - a fun read. He describes his introduction to computers while in high school - teletype, dial-up modems and paper tape.

I read the essay a few years ago, at a time when I was soaking up everything I could find related to linux.

If I remember correctly, the main focus of the essay was his comparison of Windows, Mac and linux operating systems.

I would not be surprised if you have already read the essay, but here's a link to it. Note the site has a .ru suffix. A web search may turn up other sites closer to home...

http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/in_the_ … mand_line/

tex

ewaller · 2016-07-23 20:01:19

Thanks for the link -- I've not read it. I shall. I also recommend Hackers, by Steve Levy.. I know a significant chunk of the people in that book. Contact me by email if you want specifics

Texbrew · 2016-07-23 20:31:40

Thanks, Eric. I bookmarked it for later reading. A quick scan of the chapter list makes it "required reading" for me. No doubt, I will have questions to email you with.

tex

adamlau · 2016-08-07 06:15:22

Sup, all! Started using *nix back in 2000. There used to be a shop on Lake Ave in Pasadena, CA where you could buy distro CDs and it was there where I purchased the FreeBSD Handbook + CD. Forward one year later to find me setting up FreeBSD + Apache at work while maintaing FreeBSD desktops for friends and family. 2004 rolled around and lack of driver support for the latest hardware led me to Debian/Slackware where I eventually settled on Ubuntu believing it to be easier to deploy and maintain than either Debian or Slackware (I was wrong). Migrated friends and family to Arch in 2007. My only gripe with Arch these days is its reliance on systemd. Hence, I have been looking into Alpine and Void more recently. Else, I have no major issues with Arch as evident by my lack of forum posts over the past few years.

Last edited by adamlau (2016-08-07 06:16:15)

ewaller · 2016-08-07 14:44:29

adamlau wrote:

Sup, all! Started using *nix back in 2000. There used to be a shop on Lake Ave in Pasadena, CA where you could buy distro CDs

On lake. Computerland at Union St behind the Coco's?

adamlau · 2016-08-07 16:54:06

ewaller wrote:

Computerland at Union St behind the Coco's?

Further south. The shop was housed in either The Colonnade or the Burlington Arcade.

encelo · 2016-08-14 19:46:08

adamlau wrote:

Started using *nix back in 2000.

Hey, me too! My first system was NetBSD 68k 1.4.2 running on my Amiga 1200 with an M-Tec T1230 and 8mb of Fast RAM.

adamlau · 2016-08-14 21:13:19

lol...My personal box back then was a PIII on the venerable 440BX w/ 1GB memory. Matrox AGP. 3COM NIC. I forget what else, but it was towards the higher end of the desktop class...

frank604 · 2016-08-14 21:54:26

ewaller wrote:

Texbrew wrote:
Wow... paper tape, teletype and 110 baud modems. Makes me wonder, university study or workplace?
Believe it or not, Middle School and High School. Los Angeles Unified had a Microdata computer with dial in modems. All of the high schools and middle schools in the area has ASR-33s to dial into it. It ran BASIC that was very similar to Dartmouth BASIC. The man (Tony) who was responsible for the computer was one of those very special teachers -- on saturdays, he opened (on his own time) the Math lab at the school and everyone interested from the surrounding schools were welcome to go in and work directly on the machine -- with CRT terminals and a high speed paper tape reader/punch. The system had a disk drive, but Microdata never came through on the promised DOS for it. So, using the MIT hacker culture as a model, Tony turned us loose. After a couple years, we (a group of about 10 of us, mostly guys senior to me) were able to patch the system to save programs to disk and load them back. It was very crude, but it worked. After I went to university, the system fell into disuse with the rise of 8 bit micros, but I would still stop by occasionally and help Tony bring it back up until the system was decommissioned in about 1982.

Wow, this is an interesting tidbit of history. Wish I met a teacher like Tony.

adamlau wrote:

lol...My personal box back then was a PIII on the venerable 440BX w/ 1GB memory. Matrox AGP. 3COM NIC. I forget what else, but it was towards the higher end of the desktop class...

This is a little off topic but... my brother in law is also Adam Lau. He once mentioned to me that there are quite a few people named Adam Lau in the world. There is even a facebook group only for Adam Lau. Great to see one on the forums!

Last edited by frank604 (2016-08-14 21:55:57)

Texbrew · 2016-08-15 10:36:22

@frank604

Wow, this is an interesting tidbit of history. Wish I met a teacher like Tony.

I think teachers like Tony are a rare breed.

I don't know how interested you are in computer history, but in a post in this thread, ewaller suggested a book with a link to it, "Hackers" by Steve Levy (that's a short version of the title). Right now, I'm reading the chapter on Steve Wozniak. The book is fascinating.

tex

drcouzelis · 2016-08-15 12:54:43

Guys, don't forget to mention if your computer had a "TURBO" button!

bgc1954 · 2016-08-15 14:23:17

I'm sure I had something with a "Turbo" button on it, but it must have been quite a while back since I can't remember what it did.

@Texbrew
Really enjoyed the cyberpunk article, and I've got ewallers article bookmarked for later.

Been around for quite a while but haven't been too active lately. Was much more active back when I was in my tiling phase and testing out tiling wm's like musca and alopex (Thanks Trilby for that interesting ride). Now just using openbox with fullscreen windows and keybindings that remind me of some of the tilers.

My computer journey started back in the '70s when I was working at a Radio Shack managed by a friend of mine. He ended up taking a brand new Western Regional Manager position for the new TRS-80. Good for him, not so much for me, time for another career change. Never owned a "Radio Shack" brand computer but got excited when something called a Vic 20 came out. That also had a cassette tape for data storage. Then things really heated up when the Commodore 64 came out and used "real" floppy 5 1/4" disks. Really got into basic around that time and managed to scrape together a few simple programs for my kids to learn the alphabet. Lots of "peeking" and "poking" to get those simple images on the screen.

Then just alot of tinkering with homemade rigs. Every time someone upgraded their computer, somehow, I ended up with the old one. Couldn't see the need to constantly upgrade computers every time Windows had a new and "improved" version. That's where I entered the wonderful world of Linux. I could run Linux on almost anything. And boy was I a distro hopper. I wouldn't even try to list all the distros I've tried and fallen in and out of love with, but I do still have a couple of stacks of Linux CD's kicking around.

Then I found Arch Linux. And being a good Canadian boy, I was happy with some of the Canadian roots of the distro, and finally, my stack of CD's stopped growing. Thank heaven for the rolling release. Now I have just settled on Arch and Debian Testing as my main flavors with Arch being my overall, all-time favorite. It's been fun to see the tremendous growth of Arch over the years.

Last edited by bgc1954 (2016-08-15 14:26:49)

Texbrew · 2016-08-16 01:11:21

@drcouzelis, It's a really fuzzy memory... I remember a computer with a Turbo button, but I didn't own one. I probably saw it in PC Magazine or Byte Magazine in the mid '80s, but can't remember what computer it was. OK spill, please.

@bcg1954,

Couldn't see the need to constantly upgrade computers every time Windows had a new and "improved" version. That's where I entered the wonderful world of Linux.

That's what enabled me to put my initial curiosity about linux into an actual machine. I had two old low-spec PC's that were gathering dust because we no longer trusted them for use on the internet. The older of the two presented us with the Blue Screen of Death twice on the first day it was unboxed, and it ran Windows 98-SE.

I will spare you the details, but these two old machines became my linux classrooms. With nothing to lose, and a myriad of free distros to try out, I jumped in, figured out which distros I liked, learning as I go. I have used Debian for more than 5 years, and it seldom requires me to fix anything. And frankly, I got a little bored...

Enter Arch Linux. Never boring, and I cringe a little when I do a system upgrade - I'm still an Arch newbie - and I love the challenge, from my first failed attempt to install Arch in a Virtual Machine, to where I'm now using Arch on bare metal almost every day.

My early curiosity about linux has now mushroomed into a kind of crazy hobby. Long story, but I now have Arch on one of those old PC's (runs great) and on two laptops, not to mention other machines running Debian and one running Mint. No, I don't turn them all on every day, I try to rotate through them to keep them updated.

I like OpenBox on my Arch installs. It's lean and fast, I think in a large part because Arch is its backbone.

I like your quote by Louis Hector Berlioz. I will be sharing that one with family & friends.

tex

frank604 · 2016-08-16 02:42:54

Texbrew wrote:

@frank604
Wow, this is an interesting tidbit of history. Wish I met a teacher like Tony.
I think teachers like Tony are a rare breed.
I don't know how interested you are in computer history, but in a post in this thread, ewaller suggested a book with a link to it, "Hackers" by Steve Levy (that's a short version of the title). Right now, I'm reading the chapter on Steve Wozniak. The book is fascinating.
tex

That is amazing. Thanks for the recommendation. I ordered one from amazon for $0.01 + shipping lol

drcouzelis · 2016-08-16 12:34:27

Texbrew wrote:

@drcouzelis, It's a really fuzzy memory... I remember a computer with a Turbo button, but I didn't own one. I probably saw it in PC Magazine or Byte Magazine in the mid '80s, but can't remember what computer it was. OK spill, please.

Oh, I was never cool enough to have a TURBO button. I just love the idea of it.

"See this button? This button here? If you push it, it makes my computer FASTER."

"...So... why do you even have a button? Why don't you just..."

"...FASTER."

Arch Linux

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