RunningCheetah

Member Since: October 10, 2008

A little about me

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Short Bio: I have used computers since 1982 (UNIX on the abused DEC mainframe terminals in the Vanderbilt University student computing center and CP/M on an Altair 8800 with dual-8-inch floppies, with a Hazeltine 1500 terminal with a retina-burning display and keyboard without arrow keys, but a daisy-wheel printer). :-) My first computer was a Commodore-64 with a "data-sette" to store my BASIC programs on audio cassette tapes, and I used a 19-inch, black-and-white, tube-based television as my first "monitor." By the time I bought my first Macintosh in 1989, the C-64 had dual 5.25-inch floppy drives, a Commodore monochrome monitor, a Juki electric typewriter with a Centronics parallel port as a daisy-wheel printer, a full-featured $45 word processor, and I ran Berkeley Softworks GEOS (a ripoff of the Mac OS GUI that actually worked with 64k of RAM) with a Commodore 1541 mouse. I was able to use PC-DOS and MS-DOS immediately, because Microsoft had copied CP/M's commands verbatim. I endured Windows 1.0 and up, although IBM's OS/2 2.0 was superior and had true multitasking. In the late 1980s, I was using "Wintel/DOS" PCs, Macs, AS/400s, Sun OS running on Sun SPARC hardware (as a UNIX neophyte with a shell account in the 'admin' group) and DEC's awful VAX/ULTRIX. I've been building PCs and servers for a decade and have been using Linux for eight years, with Debian GNU/Linux as my main OS, although I use other Linux distros (and *BSD), as well as Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris 10.

Machine: desktops, notebook, towers, and servers