On Wed, 2005-04-20 at 10:16 +0100, Adam Bower wrote:
On Sun, Apr 17, 2005 at 11:39:06PM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
First Unixy experience was BSD on an Amiga 1200 (heavily modified with 030 processor, SCSI CDROM and a (massive for the time) 32MB of RAM) I still have it in the loft and keep threatening to bring it to a meet.
Ooh, please do. Even though I recently sold all my Amiga stuff I'm still a great fan of the amiga. Unfortunately my Amiga 4000 only had an EC030 so couldn't run any type of Unix or Linux, BSD etc.
FWIW my first PC was a Pentium II 233, with 64 megs of Ram and a 4 gig disk which I purchased in 1997 so I could get online. The main reason I moved to Linux was because Windows was such a pile of crap compared to my experiences with the Amiga and Linux seemed like the best logical progression. Even now i'm not a fan of PC hardware at all, but then there doesn't seem to be any really "good" architectures around (at least, not that I can afford).
Agreed, I really wish there was a sensibly priced PPC architecture around, but I guess the sheer volumes involved in the x86 market keep the prices so low that anything else is going to seem expensive by comparison. I was reading a piece in the current PC Pro magazine about electricity usage and it started to focus my attention on just how wasteful the x86 architecture is in terms of power. If Intel and AMD would concentrate a bit more on getting the extra performance without the need for heavy duty cooling life would be a lot easier in terms of being cheaper to run, quieter, longer battery life in laptops, etc., etc.. With AMD being reasonably strong in the market, at least visibly, it can be easy to forget the term Wintel - Linux may well work on a lot of different architectures, but x86 is the one most used, and that is significantly as a result of it being the primary (and now only) platform for Windows. Is there nowhere its legacy doesn't infect?!
On the Unixy experience line, my first was AIX on an IBM RS6000 iirc. I got the responsibility of administering the boxes because I had an interest in Linux and had just bought a copy of Caldera OpenLinux 1.0. Massive beasts of machines they were, but even though they were ageing at the time an Exchange server setup was expected to need 4 brand new Pentium Pro 200 x86 servers to cope (not sure whether they were dual processor or not).
My first PC was an IBM L40 SX laptop, which I finally gave in and purchased on the IBM internal purchase scheme so I could run OS/2 - which was the only way I was going to use an x86 machine instead of my Amiga because I considered Windows a toy that had no place in serious usage - after all I was used to be able to put files into drawers (Amiga speak), and this poxy Windows Program Manager thing was merely a pretty launch pad for your applications and nothing more. This machine was directly responsible for getting me into Linux though as I spotted an internal IBM forum on getting Linux running on an L40 (there is still an option in the kernel compile specifically for the L40 I think). I followed that for a while, but didn't have an easy means of getting a copy - well, I probably did if I'd have investigated far enough and had the time to experiment a bit more, but my machine was already creaking at the seems with OS/2 and an enforced requirement of IBM DOS 5 and Windows 3.1 so it wasn't practical to try installing until about 4 years later when I got a spare machine - that was around 1996 ish.