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History
Navigation:
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============================
Welcome...
To the good ol' fashion facespace of sorts, minus the photo albums and
comments. Though those came eventually as well. For instance
'guestbooks' and photo albums where all but uncommon on the web before
the teen craze sites popped up. Those sites just took all the work out
of it. Even the mobile version of the largest one slow down some of
my... mildly older machines. But I'll get to that eventually.
The good ol' days
I didn't get the chance to live the good ol' days of computers, though
I'm sure that will be made up to me in the fact that I'll get to see
more of the future then those who had. But I am able to look back and
appreciate it. I'm the kind of guy who when offered a computer, I ask
"how old is it" and if the answer is "not to old" my reply is "then I'm
not interested". That's not to say I don't have any modern computers,
hell im typing this on a netbook, but I have enough 'modern' computers.
Space is limited and I have to weed out the pack for computers I'd
actually have fun with.
How it all got started
I'm 18 years old as of 2009 and not nessicarily from the era of
minicomputers and such (and no, I'm not talking about my little netbook
here). So how does someone my age get in to this hobby. With most people
who are into this hobby (this hobby I keep refering to is what I like to
refer to as 'Classical Computing') start off as kids who have used a
classical machine as a kid. Well, I've never seen a pdp11, let alone
used one, and yet I consider it the greatest machine of all time. It is,
but hardly anyone whos never used (seen) one would know it. So how am I
so in to 'Classical Computing'? Well, I'd have to say it started on many
frontiers of my computing interests as a kid all reaching back further
and further into the past. My father owned (owns) a web based software
company, and I, as a child was raised around computers. I was highly
encouraged, growing up, to learn to program. So I had. Starting with
HTML because I wanted to make webpages like daddy. And then PHP, because
I wanted my webpages to do things like daddy's did. (Daddy uses
ColdFusion as the main language in his company(s) and had tried to get
me to learn it since i was 10, and I've put it off to this day. A 4 inch
thick book will intemidate any 11 year old lugging it around school and
having to explain to all the other 11 year olds... and all his teachers
what it is, so I dropped it.) I went from PHP to mIrc in a change of
interest, which isn't a true language, but has a nice scripting engine
that really helped me understand if..else statements well as a 13 year
old (and nesseling statements... ah, good ol' messy nessy). But I wanted
more, so I learned C++, and eventually learned C as well. C showed me a
world I could love so much in computers. If I had picked up K&R as an 11
year old I might not have been so intemidated as a kid. I actually
learned C because of a certain ket interest of mine...
Operating Systems
I feel bad about jumping in to another section without truely finishing
the last, but OSes have such a big part of my interest that I feel it
deserves its own section. I am a child of the FOSS age. How many of you
old farts can say that? I say that knowing all to well its ye ol' farts
who started the FOSS movement and I'm completely joking. Whenever I was
out and about reading my webpages on programming I'd more then
occasionally run across this thing called linux. I didn't know what an
operating system was. Thats one downside to having grown up in this day
and age. Ye ol' farts grew up in a time when there were a ton of
operating systems about. particullarly BASIC CP/M and MSDOS being the
most famous durring the dawn of microcomputers [and the 'Home
Computer']. But I grew up only seeing MicroSoft's Monopoly in play. I as
a kid actually started on a Mac, but I know their OS only ran on Mac's,
and I had thought PCs only ran MS as well. Around the time I had started
PHP I had heard allot about Linux, and learned that MS wasn't the only
thing out there, but it wasn't until I got into IRC and wanted to run my
own IRC server that I had actually tried it. I remember thinking that
linux was still a program you installed, and then booted into. Before
Wibu came out, anyone else who heard you say that just laughed, and
rightly so. Eventually I figured everything out using the interents for
help. Its unfortunate that I had wanted to run an IRC server. I started
off using linux by shoveling through more config files then I have to
date. IRC has the biggest config files you will come across, and to have
to shift through so many lines as a first experiance would be a turn off
for most people. But I liked something about the control it gave me. I
knew what was going to happen now whenever anyone did practically
anything on my server. I then got very interested in Linux, and learned
everything I could about it at the time with my resources. I still used
windows as my main OS at the time, because I worked for my dad around
this time. (Oh yeah, I started homeschooling in 9th grade, and did much
of that 'schooling' while working for my dads company, all the
employees were very nice to the bosses son, and it didn't hurt to have
40 or so programmers around me, and a very kind IT guy that was
probably the only one around who really knew about this stuff). Now I
know this site ain't spiffy, but thats because I decided if I was going
to make a site about the olden days, might as well make a site that
looks like its from ye olden times. I know CSS, and own a copy of
photoshop and dreamweaver, and I have weaved dreams and such. But its
another example of how I like my stuff. Simple, loads fast, and works.
You could view this page no problem on any computer, and though all my
friends may thing it could use a bit of color, I like it. Mind you I
have many other websites out there in the modern style of Dynamic,
Beautiful, and Slow (well... all those compared to this site). I got off
track... so anyways I got into linux. My father never supported my
interest in the old, he always had the idea that the past is the past
and the future is the future. For making money, that works some times,
but for a hobby.... He opposition drove me to want to do it more, as
evil as that sounds. He actually grew up using BASIC and other OSes, and
maybe if I grew up using MSDOS I wouldn't see the appeal of using older
operating systems either. But to me, to be in a command line for the
first time [by that i mean no GUI whatsoever, of course I used the
cmd.exe utility as a childhood nerd. And a .bat script I made as a kid
is probably the first script I can remember writting ourside of BASIC
scripts out of books. (I actually had one of those cheep childrens
laptops kinda like the ones you see from leapstar, but when I was a kid
they actually had BASIC built in, and for some reason thats hard as hell
to find nowadays, all you see is 123ABC kinds now.) There was something
appealing about being in a shell for the first time. I had control over
the system. My computer was only running things I wanted it to run, not
bloated with a bunch of programs I never use, all running on startup.
(damn you explorer.exe) when I looked at the process list, I only saw
things running that I knew should be running, why? Because I told it to.
my computer lisended to me, and didn't crash when I told it to do
something it didn't wan't to do (damn windows, you look kinda lazy now)
And it did it all fast, on even my shittiest computer (compared to how
it ran windows of course) I loved the ideology of linux. Which it always
said it got from UNIX. What is this UNIX i'd ask myself while strokeing
my newly grown 14 year old scruff (allot less sexier then I remember
thinking it was). So I did some research into UNIX, which led me to BSD.
BSD was more bare then linux. I have yet to this day run any window's
manager under BSD, though heaven knows its more then possible. I don't
recall to much about my first experiances with BSD; but I do remember my
grandmother gave me an old laptop. Pentium MMX, 133MHz, 32MB of ram. A
beast of a machine. Sadly my roomate dropped it and the screen cracked
and I have yet to replace it. I was in a frenzy trying to find a
semi-modern OS to throw on it - though if the thing worked now