[TriEmbed] Linux beginning

[John Vaughters]

I started around 1999 I think, downloading RedHat over modem. It took forever. So I started buying the books with CD's in them. It was the best move I ever made to understand Computing and Operating Systems. It opened me to the world of serious computing ideas, and I started to understand how Microsoft was more of a computing cancer. They fought the most obvious standards that would promote computing as a whole, in which they would have benefited from overall growth. Instead they tried to monopolize their methods that were often inferior. Best example I can think of is ssh, but there are many others. Why in the world would they not adopt this simple and extremely effective method. For that reason alone, I shunned Microsoft and have not paid for any Microsoft products since the late 90's. I didn't pirate them either, my work always provided Microsoft, so I didn't need to buy them. First thing I always put on the Microsoft boxes was Cygwin to get the unix like feel that was just so much better in function.

The Open Source community finally lashed Microsoft with pure effectiveness that could not be overcome. Not until they got rid of the last Dinosaur Balmer did MS finally make progress again. Nardelli embraced Linux in a similar way Apple embraced Open source, use the great software that exists and build upon it to make the most amazing products. MS has done just that. Teams is amazing and they finally got their act together on security and updates. They finally realized the tribe is better than the individual. But only because they were starving in the wilderness as isolationists.

Having said that, I still am not a huge MS fan. Why would I be, Linux is superior in all but a few ways, the most important way is the user interface. MS is hands down the best and fasted way to develop awesome Apps. This I will give them. The other is the Domain, which is still a bastardization of standards, but they are the defacto standard in this area. There is a place for pay software. It just needs to be built on the community software. It's much more cost effective this way and Steve Jobs realized this way before MS. My personal biggest beef with microsoft was how they had huge cost for some of the things that was preventing me from learning. Webservers, Programming environments, ftp, email servers, or anything server for that matter. Anyone remember Back Office? What a joke, it failed so badly and was ridicules in cost. Obvious why the world left them and they failed to become the server company that they tried so hard to be. Even IBM embraced Redhat around 2000 time. They saw the writing on the wall that Open Source was the low cost alternative. MS never made it to the server world in the level they tried. They were inferior.

Didn't mean to drone on, but I have to say that Linux changed the world and anyone who embraced it early on benefited from it's freedom of knowledge. I know I did. 

John Vaughters






On Saturday, April 15, 2023 at 01:33:35 AM EDT, Robert Mackie via TriEmbed <triembed at triembed.org> wrote: 





Wow, that's cool to read.  When did folks on this list first use Linux? Just kind of curious since this is the kind of crowd that might have been early adopters.

Rob.

On Fri, Apr 14, 2023 at 7:06 PM Peter Soper via TriEmbed <triembed at triembed.org> wrote:
>  
>  
>  The early days of Linux - https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/928581/841b747332791ac4/ 
> 
> Pete 
> 
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