Old farts and new Linux

[Guy Fraser]

Jeff Lasman wrote:

>Did you ever meet Art Schawlow?  He worked at Bell Labs from '51 through 
>'61, but I know he was back a lot in later years.
>
>Art was (according to the Nobel committee, anyway) inventor of the 
>Laser, and he was an active proponent of using Microcomputers; trying 
>to get the TRS-80 Model 1 into Stanford University to replace their 
>Wang word processors.
>  
>
Oh ya, that brings back some memories. 
After graduating from Electronics, I almost got a job working for 
Wang but ended up working on Micom's for a real pr**k {pardon the pun}.

At 38 I'm practically a newbie compared to many of the people 
contributing to this tread. I made my first $40 programming the Truancy 
and Achievement application in BASIC for my High School when I was 15.

Since then I have worked on platforms and programing languages, 
including PostScript. Yes for those of you who didn't know PostScript 
is a programing language with stack based {reverse polish notation} 
math functions. One of the programs was used for displaying mathematical 
functions, it was easier to do in PostScript than anything else I had 
access to. I never did learn COBOL or FORTRAN, but used to teach JDL and 
similar things to Banking Systems Operators in Bermuda, used to process 
print jobs for Xerox Centralized Printing Systems. These were great big 
laser printers that pushed cut sheet paper at up to and over 120 pages 
per minute, while merging graphics, forms and data from either 9 track 
tape or from HIP {Host Interface Processor} connections to IBM 
mainframes. While working in Bermuda I also maintained Sun Boxes that 
accepted jobs from a DEC mainframe using LAT and RIPed the PDL jobs 
to InterPress and sent them through XNS to Xerox Centralized Printers 
over 10B5. I wrote a few programs that converted HPGL, PCL and XES to 
InterPress, XES and eventually PostScript as well as converters for 
EBCIDIC to or from ASCII translation that allowed Mac's and PC's to 
submit jobs to the Sun boxes using LPR.

Then color laser printers came out and I got tired of being tormented 
by people complaining that the blue on there word document did not look 
the same on the printed page, as well a being treated like a slave in Bermuda {guest workers were not covered by labor laws}, so moved back to 
Canada. And have been working for ISP's ever since. When I started, all 
the workstations were Mac's and the servers were all Proprietary UNIX 
variants, in 1995 I started moving some services to linux, and eventually 
all our servers. After the first signs of trouble with RH 8.0, we moved 
all our servers to FreeBSD. I still use a linux workstation at work 
running FC1 and have an RHL 9 machine at home {which I hope to move to 
FC2 soon}.

I recently started to toy with robotics, and quickly remembered what the 
old days were like. Using controller boards with a 2048 bytes of ram, 
and programming in assembly was not as romantic as I remembered it to be.
:-)