Hi all,

I discovered the Anglian Linux users group shortly before the last meeting back in August but unfortunately other commitments prevented me from coming along. I've been lurking on the list since then and have been meaning to get round to writing a short introduction ever since - finally I have.

I first became interested in computers when I saw a Sinclair ZX80 which the maths teacher at secondary school used to demonstrate some simple number theory. Shortly after that I received a ZX81 as a present and on that I learnt Sinclair BASIC and then Z80 machine code (without the benefit of an assembler). From there I moved on to a BBC Micro and learned its variety of BASIC, 6502 assembler, BCPL and Pascal.

I now work for BT at Adastral Park, their advanced technology centre at Martlesham and it is there that I was first introduced to Unix when I was given a tape of HP-UX 6.2 and asked to "install it on one of our machines and see what it could do." At the time the PC was becoming popular and it was probably just before Windows 3 was released. I was immediately impressed with Unix (HP-UX) - it seemed to be a proper operating system with real virtual memory, powerful utilities, and a proper scripting language and, if you wanted a GUI, there was the X window system to go on top.

I have continued to work with HP-UX and more latterly with Solaris too both as a SysAdmin and as a Developer using C, a little C++, Perl, Unix shell script and PL/SQL (Oracle), HTML and Javascript. I've also done a little development on the PC running Windows (and DOS even) using Visual Basic, Visual C++, C and Assembler.

During the same time I witnessed the Internet take off in a big way, remembering when we persuaded one of the gurus on site to set us up with e-mail using uucp over a 19200 serial link back to their server which had 64k capacity to the rest of the net, getting a news feed and finding that just about everything got discussed there without censorship, the emergence of the WWW with early versions of mosaic, and up to the present where everyone can't wait to set up a web site and people at home have almost as much bandwidth each as we started with for 2500 people.

I was first introduced to Linux by a contractor at Martlesham who had it running on his Laptop. I had already met some of the GNU tools and if the Linux kernel was to the same quality I knew that Linux as a system would be good. I was very impressed with Linux but sadly, although Linux was small and efficient, the hardware of the day was no match for the X window system and I went back to using the commercial unices on bigger hardware.

Since then PC hardware has improved dramatically and more recently I found that Linux had become the focus of most Free software development for Unix like systems and that increasing numbers of people were running it at home. We had just received a talk at work from Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation (and author of emacs, and gcc IIRC) and he recommended the Debian distribution so I tried installing it. For someone who already knows about disk partitions etc. and has installed Unix before it presented no difficulty and I now have it running on my PC here at home where I've used it for capturing and editing video and audio as well as e-mail, surfing the net, writing minutes etc.

Whilst Windows in it's various flavours still has much more software available than Linux, and that may never change, it nevertheless seems an exciting time for Linux as more generally useful software becomes available (rather than just developer tools) and makes it more useful to your average joe.

So back to the user group, I hope that I will be able to help some of you out and at the same time receive help and broaden my knowledge in areas of Linux I have not yet explored. Unfortunately the IRC meets are at a time that I usually can't make but if I get the chance I'll drop in and if not I hope to see some of you at the next physical meeting.

Steve Fosdick.