Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> wrote:
I think I bought the parts for and built the machine in 1990. Ran ms-dos and desqview on it at first (popular choice at the time for fidonet), then tried OS/2, and installed linux in '91 (partly because, unlike OS/2, it supported serial terminals and uucp worked properly, and i was in the process of switching from fidonet to APANA). I first installed linux on a 50MB partition to try it out...and two weeks later completely reformatted the disk, converted entirely to linux, and never looked back.
I was a comparative late-comer: my first installation was in 1998 on a new i586 laptop, but by then I already knew what I wanted, having used SunOS to access the Internet as an undergraduate student. It was much better to have a Unix-like system running on my own machine than to connect every day to a remote system via telnet or via a modem. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to learn Unix as a user before embarking on system administration, which at that point was relatively easy as I was comfortable with the shell environment and text editing. People whose first experience of a Unix-like system is on their own machine following a Linux installation have to learn the shell and utilities, text editing and system administration all at once (unless they remain perpetual beginners in a GUI environment whose skills remain at the elementary level, but I'm here interested in discussing those who learn and how they do so rather than those who don't). It might be better to start as I did with a user account, then to learn the shell, Unix utilities and text editing thoroughly, and then to move on to basic administrative tasks, instead of trying to absorb everything in a hurry.