What is on Your Mind?

As a young clerk working in a public hospital in the early 2000's. We logged onto a mainframe which contained patient tracking and medical record information via a terminal emulator on our Windows workstations.

It's only in the last few months though that I've started acquiring Linux distros, borrowing books from the library and taking a serious interest in the topic.

started out with sco unix maybe in 93 gradually moved on to AIX 3yrs later my first real unix admin job. Then opportunity of becoming a real field engineer came along later and I grepped it - moved into Sun, here I played with all kinds of solaris flavors, sunos, solaris 2.3-2.4-2.5-2.5.1-2.6-7-8-9 handled all kinds of machines, from squaretop IPC box to pizzabox sparc1-20 sparc1000, ultras-to-enterprises even the clones all except E10ks, I've played with all kinds of cluster softwares, firewall softwares, backup software, all kinds of weird storage systems available to run with a sun server.

I got tired of burnt weekends working in freezing data-centers so I left and joined another company my first end user job in many years. Three years later I got bored, left and join re-joined the industry been working last few years on hpux/mcsg slowly moving into linux.

My crystal ball tells me the next big thing believe it or not is trending towards AIX. If it really comes true maybe I go into it again and start over from scratch.

I met unix in my last role as a technical operations analyst

I saw unix boxes around in the late 80 but at the time I thought I would finish my studies and be a pastor (and would have nothing to do with computing...).
When I realized I was doomed and had to accept computers in my life, I started to learn cobol on a prime running a true unix V/386 in a school for adults (I still have the 18 51/4 floppies...)
then went on mainframes (GCOS) and started to compile and try to run a linux at home (a99.patch118...) that was in 92-93... I left mainframe (no future said I at the time...) for my first true contact with unix: HP-UX 8 on a 9000/822 and a 9000/855 as a developper (shell/oracle/SQL) but was soon noticed for my OS understanding and was asked to accept unix administration (93)

At AT&T in 1990, but I did MULTICS and GCOS TSS with Waterloo FRED first at Honeywell Bull, so I had editing, regex, scripting and many other UNIX-like bits when I arrived! UNIX was, in some respects, MULTICS very ingeniously cut down to run on small machines. A lot of fork/exec simplified the code. Back then, MULTICS did everything in one process, where commands were just dynamicly discovered subroutines, but needed special hardware to provide a segmented VM, uncannily like I386+ CPU memory manager hardware with 4K pages and 4Mbyte segments. MULTICS was just starting to play with pipes and fork/exec sort of scripting when my machine shipped out.

First time was when i was given a copy of the original Debian... took a couple of hours to install it on the old 486.

Also required two pots of coffee... miss the old days of an install taking some effort

I found interest in the library, my father has a job related to technology and I always found that I would follow his steps most likely. I found unix in early 2005, but I still talk to admins that have been using linux for a few decades and they are still reading manuals.