[kwlug-disc] what the rest of us were doing..

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

My experience with computers was at first a solely classroom course of
FORTRAN during university.
That was perhaps 1981 or thereabouts. The instructor used a blackboard and
that was that.
No hands on experience at all. I was not impressed, nor interested.

A couple of years later, home computers started getting popular in Egypt.
Those who can afford
it got Apple II or IIc. The rest got a TI (don't remember the exact model,
but it was fairly common
for a year or two). I tried playing with them at relatives and friends, and
I was hooked for life.
When the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (from the UK) was available, and I bought
one, and had endless
hours of fun learning BASIC, with peak and poke, loading programs from
tape, typing them from
magazines, and so on.

Then I applied for a job that had computer stuff in it. Basically something
equivalent to OHIP here
but limited in scope to government employees and pensioners were
implementing a computer
system as part of a foreign grant. The computer was an NCR mainframe with a
whopping 1 MB
of RAM, and six washing machine sized hard disks each with 500MB! A year
earlier a friend was
doing a civil service period, and since he was a graduate of computer
engineering, he was tasked
with programming an ICL computer (also UK). His program would have a
maximum of 600 bytes
of accessible RAM!

As part of the mainframe project, data entry was done by COBOL programs
running on PCs, that
store the data on 5.25" floppy disks, then a driver will collect them at
the end of the day and
courier them to the computer center where they were uploaded to the
mainframe for processing.
There were no leased lines or modems at the time (at least in Egypt).

One guy from the USA was the project lead for the data entry system, and he
used APL with all
the weird hieroglyph ideograms on it to write helper stuff, including an
editor I think. Totally
impressive what it could do.

A couple of years later I was moonlighting with a 'software house' that got
a project writing an
automation system for a real estate builder, and it ran on an NCR Tower
Motorola 68020 CPU,
and had UNIX on it. I was hooked again because it was far more flexible
than the archaic
mainframe batch oriented paradigm, and much more powerful that PCs and DOS.

A few years later, I had gained access to Usenet at work, which was over a
2400 baud modem
over X.28 (which is dialup X.25). The accountant always complained about
the costs, and I said
that this was how business is conducted in the company all over the world,
and that we are the
ones that are behind. Since I was searching for a UNIX like system to run
on a PC since we did
not have internet access (only some Usenet groups),. I subscribed to the
Minix group. I saw
a guy called Linus post about something he is doing for the 386, which will
not be big or anything.

By 1995 or so there was internet access. I also bought a set of CDs with
Debian, Red Hat, Slackware,
and other distros on it, and played around with them. Desktop under Linux
was not mature then, but
it was fun to experiment with.

By around 2005 or so, I was running Mandrake as my desktop, dual booted
with Windows. A couple
of years after that, I went with Kubuntu without any Windows, and have been
on Kubuntu then
Xubuntu ever since for both my desktop and all my servers.
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