Part I: Birth of a Nerd
To know where I’m going, it should help to know where I’ve been. I’m also writing this partly in order to establish my credibility with readers who don’t know me personally. It’s easy, and perhaps understandable, to dismiss what I say on the basis that I’m in law school rather than pursuing a CS PhD. While my skills don’t even begin to approach those exhibited by many of the tremendously talented individuals in the Linux community, I hope that my life history can convey what abilities and knowledge I do have, and my passion for computing in general and Linux in particular. In any case, what follows is a brief overview of my desktop computing history.
My formative years were spent in dual environments. On the one hand, I spent countless hours behind books, developing a love of reading and a familiarity with the original text-based interface. On the other, I spent time both at school and at home on Macintoshes, and avoided clicking on anything that didn’t have a fun-looking icon (Shufflepuck and Dark Castle were my favorites). Perhaps the first indication that I was a budding computer nerd was my delight at “discovering” the debug prompt after a rare crash.
A few years later I was running a 486 DX/33 (8 MB RAM, 100 MB HDD, 15″ SVGA CRT…what a beautiful machine it was!) with a “Turbo” button on the front that I would click on so that I could play Tie Fighter and other games (the former listed a 66 Mhz machine as part of the minimum specs, but thankfully my machine, running at half that clock speed, handled it gracefully).
Here I learned a valuable lesson:
* Curiosity is crucial. Sometimes you must be willing to sacrifice efficiency in order to satisfy your curiosity. This is a necessary cost of learning a new system.
Were it not for my curiosity at the little blinking cursor and the wise counsel of my father, I might never have typed that first DIR command, and the many, many other commands after it. I was genuinely curious about this strange, arcane interface, and spent many happy hours reading through bulky manuals and 3-2-1 Contact! articles on elementary BASIC programming. Much as my switch from MacOS to MSDOS required that I sacrifice time and energy to learn the system, so it did with going from Windows to Linux, but the key was that I found it genuinely enjoyable to do something as seemingly mundane as editing autoexec.bat (or as the case may be now, xorg.conf).
Time went on and I acquired a Windows 95 machine. The migration to Win95 was smooth because the investment I had made in MSDOS and Win3.1 was directly applicable to Win95 and the newer included version of MSDOS. However, while the initial fixed cost I paid (learning to use the system) was low, the continuing operational cost (actually using the system) was relatively high. As a prospective IT professional, I experimented in many areas – networking, security, and other aspects of system administration that were accessible to someone with few programming skills. I began to find it difficult, however, to maintain the little computer setup I had at home – many tasks too big to be done easily by a human but too small for a full blown compiled program were completed inefficiently through semi-manual means (RECORDER.EXE and clunky batch file scripting come to mind). As I developed into a power user with thousands of files and multiple boxes, I found my consumer-oriented OS constraining.
I built my next system around Windows 98, and later Windows XP, where I enjoyed the ease of use and widespread compatibility that Windows affords, but suffered initially from the same power user problems as I had with Win95. The introduction of the internet into my family’s home helped enormously – all of a sudden, I could seek out and install third-party programs that made my system more powerful and flexible, and I continued to spend time playing and learning. I could look for ways to hack the Windows registry and other parts of the OS, and in the process of following others’ instructions, I often taught myself new things as well. For several enjoyable years, I was content with my desktop computing experience. My hardware worked great, I had lots of great software to play around with, and for the most part, my system was stable. Looking back, I realized something important:
* Many power users can configure their systems to their satisfaction. They may not see significant room for improvement in their computing experience. They don’t know what they are missing.
Soon I was off to college with an iMac running a newly-released copy of Mac OSX. The interface was beautiful then, as it is today. However, the real key for me was the discovery of Terminal.app, the first second CLI in an Apple operating system. OSX’s BSD underpinnings meant that I was exposed to a truly powerful CLI, and gradually materials referencing Unix and Unix-like systems became a little less mysterious.
* Linux and Unix can seem strange and mysterious to a dyed-in-the-wool Windows user. That is normal, and that is natural – but it is mistaken. Despite what you may have heard, Linux can be demystified.
My iMac’s major shortcoming was that it was just barely powerful enough to run OSX. I would have preferred to run MacOS 9 (the original installed OS), but the fact of the matter was that I had a copy of Office that ran on OSX, not on OS 9. Eventually it came time to build or buy a new system. Thanks to my growing familiarity with various operating systems, whether through first-hand knowledge or hearsay, I had a variety of choices in front of me:
- Buy a Mac. Pros: Familiar GUI, BSD base. Cons: Expensive, can’t build my own.
- Build a Windows box. Pros: Familiar GUI, large software library, cheaper hardware. Cons: Have to pay for XP.
- Build a Linux or BSD box. Pros: Free (can buy faster hardware), Unix underpinnings. Cons: Almost completely unfamiliar territory, no games.