What is on Your Mind?

My first touch was on Xenix on a machine that the company I worked for purchased (an original IBM AT, the first I'd ever seen). I remember the OS install taking forever. Then years later, we moved to HP-UX and converted all of our mainframe applications to run there. Since then, it's been varients of Linux for me when I'm not forced to use M$ products at work.

My first contact was in late '95 during my HTL education, where we had a few PCs running Linux (got me started with Perl and C, too, and sparked my interest in security). Went through a few distributions 'till I tried Debian (Woody), and got stuck there. Tried a few of it's descendants, as well as *BSD and Solaris, and was forced to get up to speed on HP-UX for work (couldn't say that I like it), but none of those held my interest quite as much.

1985 - Unix System 3 on a "super-micro", the buzz word of the day for small computers based on 16bit non Intel cpu's. It had 2x 40mb disks, and 8 serial ports. My customer paid 20,000 for it.
I started selling SCO products (Xenix) in 1986, and sold each new product as it appeared.
My favorite OS though was Univac OS1100. It had the best source control system. Each line of source code contained a field indicating the version that it was added in, and the last version that it appeared in. So that if the current revision of the file was 30, you could retrieve version 25 by simply copying file,-5 to temp. Its TIP (transaction interface program) was remarkably similar to modern Web Development environments.

I don't remember the flavor of UNIX but the hardware was a DECSystem10 in 1983.

1983 too, Unix version 7 (TNIX) on a Tektronix 8560, 16 bit LSI 11/23 running at a couple of Mhz, 256 KB RAM, 20 MBytes hard disk, no networking, no graphics, no vi, the only editor was ed, but, at that time, all this was really cool in front of other OSes, especially the C compiler :-)

1998 - SCO Unix system 5

To put it succinctly: Staples. One copy of Mandrake cost less than a fourth of XP's currently ridiculous price. After several days stuck in wonder-what-this-button-does mode, I decided it wasn't so bad.