[wellylug] WellyLUG Future

[Bruce Hoult]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2018 at 1:03 PM, Andrew Ruthven <andrew at etc.gen.nz> wrote:

> On Fri, 2018-04-27 at 22:25 +1200, Jethro Carr wrote:
> > I’m not sure how far back it was actually founded before then.
>
> I attended the first Wellington Linux Users Group meeting, which was
> held in a meeting room at Wellington City Council. I'm thinking '94 or
> '95 kind of time.


You brave pioneers! You probably had boxes and boxes of floppies!

I was late to Linux, being restricted by not having any x86 computers
available to me -- and not willing to buy one specially at the time. At
some point in maybe summer 1995/96 a client loaned me a Pentium 66 running
Linux for me to write an app for Mac that talked to a MySQL database on the
Linux machine. As I recall, I had to reverse-engineer the protocol.

I didn't use Linux on my own machine until MkLinux CDs were handed out at
the 1996 WWDC (May 13-17).

I didn't feel any need to go to meetings about Linux. I'd already by then
for several years had a VUW-castoff SPARC ELC that I'd used to learn enough
Unix to bluff my way into a C/Unix programming contract working on Sun
terminals connected to a Tandem "mainframe" at TSSC. That was memorable as
the time I started to use emacs. I've pretty much used nothing else since...

So by the time I had access to Linux was just another Unix ... nothing too
mysterious there.

Bored with booting my Mac alternately into MacOS and MkLinux, in mid 1997 I
bought a runout HP Pentium Pro 200 server cheap when the PII was the new
hotness due to being able to run 16-bit code such as Windows 95 reasonably.
I didn't give a damn about 16 bit code as I was only interested in Linux on
it so the PPro was perfect. I bought a boxed copy Red Hat Linux from Quay
Computers to put on it -- I guess it would have been 5.0 or 5.1.

In late 1998 when I taught a basic C on Unix programming course at a place
on Courtenay Place. They only had a room full of Windows PCs so I used
Linux (I think LinuxPPC by then) on an external hard disk with my shiny new
266 MHz G3 Powerbook as a server, and had the students use PuTTY on the
Windows machines. Even with only I think 64 MB RAM and 20 people using it
everything was lightning fast -- with the size of programs people were
writing you'd type "gcc hello.c -o hello" and hit return and the prompt
would appear so quickly people thought nothing had happened.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wellylug.org.nz/pipermail/wellylug/attachments/20180429/d2c72416/attachment.html>