On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 16:35, Joost Roeleveld <[email protected]> wrote: > On Monday 04 April 2011 11:13:58 Pandu Poluan wrote: >> Oh, the nostalgy... :-) >> >> My first computer I believe was an Apple ][, a hand-down from an >> uncle. It ran only for 1-2 weeks before it went to the Bit Bucket in >> the Sky. > > That's sad, only 2 weeks... > A friend of my dad got us an apple-emulator, had a game I played a lot untill > I found out that the game was incomplete and would always crash at the same > point. It was a point-click adventure... > >> Then my parents got me an Atari 800XL. That's where I cut my >> programming teeth with its built-in BASIC. > > Yes, the old days with Basic. I wonder if I still have the old programs... The > 3.5" floppy-disks are still around somewhere.. > >> When its floppy drive (5.25") gave up the ghost, I got another >> hand-down; a PC-XT compatible no-name with a huge (at that time) 20 MB >> hard disk. > > 2nd one we had was a 386sx-16mhz with 2 mb ram and 40mb harddrive. > I did try to install linux on that once, but the network-install took forever. > The NIC could do 10mbit half-duples (coax), but effective speed was less. > Symptoms: > download 1KB at full speed > card crashed > driver resets after 5 minutes > ... repeat... >
Okay, I have to be honest: I LOL-ed at that... xD > That was in 2.0.x kernels and I think I saw a change-log where that driver > finally got fixed in 2.6.0 (could be mistaken on that. It was an Intel > Etherlink-16) > > I don't have that card anymore. > >> Again, it died after serving me & my brother for a couple of years, >> and we got a "PC Brand 486 SLC" desktop. And there I dabbled in Pascal >> and ASM, making replacement drivers for MS-DOS :-P ... I still >> remember tuning QEMM386.sys trying to eke the last bytes of Low >> Memory... > > What's the most low-memory you could get it and still use it? > I managed to get low memory to around 634KB (If I remember correctly) using > the memory-tools that came with Norton Utilities at the time. > I don't really recall... but around the same number, I guess. 630-something. Actually, I once managed to get 639KB, but lots of apps became unstable, so I went slightly more conservative :-) >> Afterwards, I started university, and its a blur of PC clones (and >> Windows 9x)... and I shifted mental-gears to become a network engineer > > When did you switch to Linux? > > I switched when MS Windows 95 crashed once too many and decided to delete some > files along with it. I didn't bother fixing that installation and eventually > reclaimed the diskspace and removed it from /etc/lilo.conf. > Too many apps* I use day-by-day have only Windows version, so I never did switch to Linux :-( First time I ever deployed Linux for day-to-day work was when I started an IT Training company with my former professor. We installed Fedora Core but replaced the UI with xfce. However, not until Ubuntu Hardy did I finally got serious about migrating to Linux. Currently am still migrating the non-legacy servers to Linux from Windows * please consider "games" as "apps" :-P Rgds, -- Pandu E Poluan ~ IT Optimizer ~ Visit my Blog: http://pepoluan.posterous.com
