Scott --sidewalking-- wrote: > > I wonder if all (or most) of you are in similar careers and that is > why you are so proficient with compiling and testing and tweaking > all of this stuff. Or is it just a hobby that has gone on for so > long that you have advanced your knowledge of Linux/Debian to these > levels that all of you are at? My formal education is electrical engineering. But I was an unusual engineering student because I liked writing software and took an abundance of CS classes beyond the single required Fortran class. I had done the proverbial teaching myself basic while standing up in a Radio Shack store in front of a RS-1 therefore learning Honeywell assembly programming on the 36 bit word machine using punch cards did not seem so bad. And I really think my typing skills were helped by writing all of those class project Pascal programs on paper terminals where you can't erase your mistakes. Fortunately that was the last semester they taught classes using those and all of my later courses used H19 and VT100 video terminals. I graduated with a BSEE in 1984. I work doing VLSI chip design for microprocessors. Doing electrical design today is mostly about how well you can drive the computer for simulation and modeling. Which for me is great fun but still work. Not getting any play time for other things at work I soon found Minix for play time at home. I loaded this on my home computer and tried my best to tie into USENET. But Minix was slow and limited and always frustrating. Then one day I was reading comp.os.minix and saw this posting about a new kernel which needed a 386 but would run in full 32-bit protected mode. And then another followup saying try this kernel, it was good, really good. I gave it a try. It only had a shell and init invoked it in an infinite loop, but gcc was almost working and so more code could follow. I converted my Minix system over into a Linux system and have never looked back. That was version 0.11. But it was not until 0.12 that things like VM really got working. All of the GNU Project software was then available to be ported to create a full system. Truly a dream come true. While on the job I have mostly been using commercial hpux systems. Currently I write EDA/CAD software for chip design. And I am always hacking on computer systems either at work or at home. Bob
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