Episode: 766
Title: HPR0766: MrGadgets finds Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0766/hpr0766.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 02:06:35

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Good morning, good afternoon, good evening.
It is Mr. Catchett's once again, driving through the, what passes for a rush hour traffic
to Kansas City and to continue on on my journey through technological history here on the
micro computer and treasuring on towards when I started using Linux believe me or not,
believe it or not, we're going to get there eventually.
So I was working at the, the flutter company in Kansas City, they got bought out by Informix
Corporation and that gave me lots of good, good access to like some machines.
And Solaris and Unix and all kinds of times that there, but I left down to work for another
company here that had the headquarters here in Kansas City because it's not much, it's
not very nice being, you know, supposed to be a merger, but it was really cut bought out by the
California company and we got some perks about that, but you know, not working to headquarters
is not necessarily a good thing and so I started in working for a local company here in
Kansas City area that works in financial services, that took me away from the access to the
command line and being able to do, you know, shell scripting and all that kind of stuff and
actually veered me off into OS 2, think about it, this is the early 90s though, what would
you base your enterprise wide high availability solution to process financial quest with, say,
a thousand seats with people, would you base it on Windows 3.1 or would you, you know,
based on OS 2? So I veered off into that direction and started learning that operating system
and you know there were a lot of positive things about OS 2 and I still to the say kind of
agree with some of the guys that I work with that I think IBM should actually open source OS 2 to
get another interesting thing into the mix. It could be modernized into a more modern operating
system with all of the built swivel USB drivers and other kinds of things that we expect now,
Wi-Fi drivers, those kinds of things. That company actually bought PS2 machines, I be real
IBM PS2s, we use NCR machines for a while there, once again, National Cash Register NCR
made computers, they don't anymore, the back of this time frame they made computers, in fact,
they were the only other people who used micro channel bus and we used micro channel bus,
which was a vast improvement, you might laugh now because it didn't have wide adoption,
but it was a vast improvement over the ISA kinds of bus machines that were of the time where
we had to, you know, use a little bit switches to set, you know, addresses for things, things
like that, micro channel is much more of a plug-and-play. It's just that IBM had a patent on
that and thought people should pay them a license fee, put it in their machines. And
thusly, the only people who actually used micro channel in their business machines at
the time was NCR, the reason why NCR had been discussing the small computer serial interface.
And so the Scuzzy Interface patent was traded to IBM for the micro channel bus patent,
and there's a Scuzzy found wider adoption, of course, and micro channel bit by the wayside.
I did have to have my internet connection, and so I went through a whole series of internet
providers, probably one every six months, I get one, just get it running pretty well,
and then they would be bought out by somebody else. At this time, also, my wife's a teacher,
and we had a lot of Macintoshes, this is not OS10, this is back in the old OS6, so
OS7 days, and things like that, and I was figuring out how to get my modem to dial in to these
providers for my internet connection. Of course, it was on land, it was the time of modems,
right, to go in, though I speak to the houses very commonly back then, and I was figuring out how
to do that. Most of the time, they would just have a set up desk, but that didn't do me any good.
I would call up the provider and just say, okay, what do I need to put in at such a such a point?
If you just tell me, you know, what this is, I can set it up on my Mac system.
It's like nearing loss here. This is actually, back when I was setting up Macs and setting up
Ethernet back in the 80s, it was before DNS got invented, as far as I know, but at least before it
was widely in use. So static IPs were the rule of the day, and you know, you assigned those IP addresses
to every single person out there, and it doesn't seem strange to me, because that was the way you did it.
You managed your network, right? Well, there was this crazy thing that Macintosh would do.
This was once again back in the earlier pre-OS-10 Unix times of days.
It could actually, you could tell it a range of IP addresses that you wanted the machine to have,
and then it would go out there and try an address in that range, and if it didn't get back a
conflict that said somebody already had that IP address, it would just assign that to itself.
So, essentially, it was a predecessor to DNS, except it was the machine saying,
here's the range of things I'm going to try to assign to myself, and it was catch, catch, can.
It was just crazy. The creativity that people had before they came up with, why don't we have
a server, those these things out? I had to do a lot of this, of course, since I was using Mactosh,
by hand, and I actually had one guy who called me back and said, you know about Mactosh,
is right? Would you like to help this other guy who has a Macintosh? I don't have no idea what
to tell him to do to be able to log in. I actually ended up trading for some months of service,
and answered support questions for him from Mactosh. They call people, you've been set up on
their system, but I kept on going through them and going through them, and it was some of them
actually gave me shell accounts, and I could still do a little shell scripting and get straight to
the raw command line on those machines. Somewhere in this time frame, I discovered two things.
Number one, I discovered micro centers. In fact, I know exactly when I discovered
micro centers in the first time. It was in Houston, Texas. I went to Houston, Texas six times
during the summer between May and September of 1998, and I know that for a fact because that was
first time I came across a micro center. I looked out my hotel window and there it was cross the
highway from the Miria hotel I was staying in, and I know it was 98 because I stayed up. I took
a little nap and got up at midnight and went over to buy my copy of Windows 98 at that store.
They opened up at midnight, you know, back when releases of Windows were a big deal, and they
actually came up on the year that was their name. So that's just me, isn't it? All right, so
micro center, and it was at a micro center. I don't remember whether it was the one there in Houston,
like I said, six times the Houston between May and September. Boy, that's really the prime time
you want to go to Houston, right? All for one client, except for one trip to another client that we
have. We have basically three clients there in Houston, four now, and we have three at the time.
And either at that Houston store or at the Boston store, which is at 333 memorial
drive up in Cambridge, I know that for a fact because that was my address according to
microsenter for years. And finally, when they put up microsenter here in the Kansas City area,
they had two addresses for me. One was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one was my address here in
Kansas City. It may have been at that Boston micro center store. I have sent myself on a couple of,
you know, goals that are achievable in life. I've gone to every fry store, and except for the
new ones that they open, but I've gone to every existing fry store, as far as I know, in California,
and I'm working on all the other fry stores in every other state. I've hit all three of them
in the Houston area. And in fact, I went to one of them like the old cush. It was like within
a week of it opening down there south of Houston close to the space center. It of course has a space
beam. And I was at the micro center there, back to micro center, and I came across this corral,
I think it was, version of Linux, this Unix-like operating system. And this was a fascinating kind
of thing to me. Now, this is still the time of, you know, the dialect, right? So you pretty much
had to get CDs. It wasn't even common to have DVDs at this time, but you pretty much had to get CDs
to do an install, because you weren't going to be downloading a whole bunch of stuff very fast
over your internet connection. And so package CDs were very, very common at the time. Now, I don't
know how to work with the open source things. I'm assuming that it fell under the aspect of
they were selling you a little bit of support, right? You know, because of the box set, you can
call them up and get at least some answers to your questions and things like that. And you were,
they were providing the software to you on the CDs, and it was duplication of the CDs. Whatever
their justification for it was about 50 bucks or so. You could buy a copy of this stuff. And
eventually, and probably somewhere, maybe in the pile of carp, it's an acronym, of stairs
in the mad scientist lab, there may still be a Suicy Linux, or Suicy Linux, however it is pronounced.
It was probably an open package, because that was usually my one on some of these things.
The Boston store, especially, had some great open package kinds of things, where people bring
stuff back into the store and you get a discount on it. And I attempted to install that on a
Procival app top that I had at the time. And I had the Procival app pretty well tricked out as much
as you could. It had a removable CD bay, and I had a replaceable hard drive that I could slip
into that bay. And also, I could slip out the CD ROM drive and put in a very useful little drive
that would write to zip disks. These are the old 100 megabyte original zip disks. And that one
stayed in there quite a bit. And so I had the Toshiba, but you know, there were various
and sundry things that were problematical, getting dial up to work, and all that kind of thing was
a little bit tricky based upon what kind of modem you had, and whether it was a wind modem,
which good luck on that, or whether it was a real modem chip, it was built into the machine,
and the sound and things like that. I basically, as I remember, got that machine to the point where I
could get to a cabin line, but I was never going to get an excellent dose to work on it. And you
know, I played around with it some, but you know, I didn't stick with it and got it off onto another
tangent or something like that. And I started actually carrying a secondary laptop that was not
the worklet to try doing my own stuff on it. This consisted of the extremely overpriced Sony
Vios, which I would never buy near, because I couldn't afford those, but I was finding reusable
buys from those used, and they were very, very thin. Didn't have a drive included. You'd have to
have an external drive, but you know, it was a viable solution. I wanted something as minimal
in terms of weight, if I'm going to carry an extra laptop with me for my personal stuff, I wanted
to be minimal as possible. And I tried that out on the various Sony's, and never quite got everything
going. To the point that, you know, I had a command line, but it really wasn't good to do the
communications, and I wasn't good to get to a doomy. And I did play around with the sound,
it was never working quite right with them and things. Typical time to things, at the time,
that would happen with laptops. And I wanted to be something that was looking on the road,
and so I made some attempts there, that Linux along the way, there in the 90s,
but that's not really running my desktop. None of them ever actually stuck, and it didn't really
own a desktop machine that was easy compatible until the late 90s, when I actually purchased one of
those just to be able to branch off into that realm of things, and never did try to put
anything on the beige box that was Linux-related and things like that.
So that takes you all the way through the 90s, pretty much just occasionally working with it,
but never, never quite taken, and we didn't really have anything going on at work that was
anything related to that. And eventually, I got to the point where I had another laptop that was
an IBM thingpad, I think pads for several years there from work, and it started getting into
some situations where it was having problems with the hardware and things like that, and I
re-discovered Linux in the form of topics, which will be the next iteration of this, but I think
I probably rattled on here often enough. One last thing, though, on the technological side of
things that you kind of forget about, number one, I always like 1200bh, because I could read
that fast and comprehend and not ever have to scroll back or stop, but 1200bh was perfect for me,
1200bh was just a little bit too fast in watching all the text go by from the BBS, but I could push
myself in 2400. The interesting thing technologically that you have to remember,
pre-the idea of having various concepts of getting high speed in your house. Most people,
I had to wait for years, but most people have a choice of if they live in an urban area,
a cable mode, some kind of DSL kind of a solution, fiber if they're lucky, right? So there's
various kinds of solutions, but back in the day, it was all about the dial-up, and I had AT&T
dial-up that I settled on, because they had lots of dial-up numbers all over the place where I was
traveling to, and that's what I used for years and years and years. I bought one of the first
quote-unquote modern pieces of equipment that I bought that was kind of the wave of the future
from Apple was one of the very first airports. It looked like a flying saucer, about four inches
in diameter, five inches in diameter for this disc, right? And it looked like a giant hockey puck
or one of the things they used for curling, right? But it had this little angled thing that came out
of it, and you would plug in your wires there, and that, of course, gave me Wi-Fi, and of course,
it had an ethernet port on it, but the other thing it had on it was a modem with built-in,
and that's how I provided Wi-Fi to the first iBooks that had Wi-Fi capability, and the first Wi-Fi
capability at our house was provided through AT&T dial-up from the very first model of the airport,
dialing in to get to the internet connection, and then sharing that over Wi-Fi 802-11b, of course,
which was more than fast enough for how fast that dial-up connection would go.
Anyway, this is Mr. Gadget. It's kind of wandering through some of the technological issues along the way,
and next time we'll actually talk about when I really started using Nopics and Ernest fixing
my laptop problems with it, and continuing on to use that as my dual-boot solution of choice
up until right now. We'll talk to you later. You'll be careful about here on the
you know technological front here, and I will be trailblazing ahead of you. Bye now.
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