OSNews

I got my undergrad degree in 1996. My first PC with Linux, I think, I got in 1995, where I got Red Hat that defaulted to some < 1.0 kernel but had a 1.2 kernel as optional. I'd been exposed to it before that when we needed to set up machines for a programming competition, so we got our hands on an early Slackware, which places that in 1993 at the earliest.

I'd always been interested in more non-mainstream computers. My first x86 machine, I got in 1995 with the full intention of installing Linux. I used some tool to repartition the drive and dual boot Windows 95 and Linux. I remember naming the machine "normal" because I had just read a Douglas Adams novel that had characters who hunted "perfectly normal beasts." My graphics card (some pre-Rage ATI) had a whopping 1 meg of framebuffer, so the best I could do was 8-bit color at 1152x864. I thought that was so great. I used that computer to develop my senior project, which was a raytracer, and I recall being somewhat frustrated by having to implement dithering methods to be able to see what I was rendering. Before the Linux PC, I was an avid Atari user. I had 8-bit computers first, then an ST, then a Falcon. One day, something clicked in my head, and I decided that I wanted something with a cutting-edge CPU, so I went out and bought this Pentium box from CompUSA. Linux turned out to be even cooler because it wasn't just a community around a platform (as it was with Atari and Amiga users), but a community of Free Software, where people shared a heck of a lot more too.