Episode: 1179
Title: HPR1179: Interview with Mark A Davis of TWUUG
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1179/hpr1179.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 21:08:28

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This is an interview with Mark Davis of the Tidewater Unix user group, which I recorded
a couple of months ago because of various occurrences in my private life.
I was unable to get it edited until now.
Unfortunately, in this, the first interview that I attempted to do, I found out that I
really needed a new microphone for doing interviews.
I have tried to salvage my end of the sound as best I can.
Fortunately, Mark's end of the sound came out very well.
So I urge you to overlook my inadequacies and listen to him tell his story of over 25
years of involvement with Unix and Linux.
Thank you.
Hello, this is Frank Bell again.
I'm here with Mark Davis.
Mark is the head, the unofficial head, is there no elected officers?
The unofficial head of the Tidewater Unix user group, also known as 12.
The group functions very much as a community, but Mark is very much our leading spirit.
A little bit of intro when I moved to this part of the world a couple of years ago, I moved
from an area where I did not have a love that was at all convenient for me to attend.
The nearest one was well over an hour and a half away in the evening traffic.
So I was overjoyed when I got here and found there was an active user group.
And even better, it's 15 minutes away from my house.
So I thought it might be interesting to hear a little bit of Mark's story.
So Mark, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Well right now, I'm the director of information systems and communications at Lake Taylor,
transitional care hospital in Norfolk.
And we do use our current facility as the to host twig.
And like you said, I kind of, I think of myself as kind of a benevolent dictator when it
comes to twig.
I don't like to use that word, but you're right that we don't have any elected officers
and nobody seems interested in using Robert's rules or making it more complicated than
it needs to be.
So we pretty much just act as an informal group.
Okay, and of course I can see since you're the person with the meeting room that would
give you kind of a leg into being the leader of the group, just for curiosity, what is
a transitional hospital?
Well Lake Taylor has a long history about 120 something years and it used to be a part
of the city where people would go for indigent care and its role has changed dramatically
over the past 120 years.
Right now you can think of us as a long term or rehab type hospital and also a nursing
home combined.
So our role is a little unique when it comes to healthcare, which is interesting because
we do use Linux and we use Unix and have pretty much since we started using computers.
So an unusual facility using an unusual, you know, at least as far as the business community
goes, an unusual operating system.
Well, I think that leads into why did the, why did you and the hospital make the choice
to use a Linux based network?
Well, as you probably know way back when before there was an MS Windows or several other
operating systems, Unix was probably the premier operating system or was the premier operating
system for use in all business type systems and when I came to Lake Taylor in 1989, they
had already purchased a system from what's called a FAR or Value Addie reseller.
Your name was Monet Information Systems, they're based in Smithfield and you know back
then it was computers are very expensive and we had just passed the mini computer phase
and into the micro computer phase but multi-user was a very cost effective way of running
the system.
So we had a single ALTOs system, a 986T for anyone that's listening that remembers the
ALTOs systems and the ALTOs 986T ran Xenix and it was a multi-user system and at the
same time I was hired which was early in 89, they had just upgraded the platform to an
ALTOs, I think it was an ALTOs 2000, I can't remember exactly, but ALTOs was a big name
and multi-user Unix computers and the different areas of the building, they were probably
about 10 terminals and they were literally terminals, ALTOs terminals, but they were
more VT 100, Y's you know type terminals where people would log into it and use the accounting
software which was the primary purpose for it being there.
When I got there that's pretty much all it was used for was accounting and payroll and
we quickly expanded and added more machines and just to let you know how terrifying it
is to depend on a var, they didn't have a, you know, being a small company, they didn't
have an IT department or MIS is what it used to be called management information systems.
And so they started small, they hired me, I was three quarter time, a part time or three
quarter time, I was still going to ODU, I'm earning my degree in computers and so it was
an excellent opportunity for me and for them so they could get slave labor for a while
as you know.
That is what your first job.
And you've been there ever since?
I have, I've actually worked in several other places too but that was my first, I would
say, real job although prior to that I was in a small computer store named Bits and
PCs which probably nobody's heard of but building computers and helping people and before
that I worked at Radio Shack and that was my dream job from being a child of course
what you think of as a child and going into adulthood are totally different things when
you realize it's definitely not the dream job but I do like to interrupt myself, I do
that all the time.
What was I talking about was Radio Shack.
No no no before that we were talking about the hospital, oh when I got there they didn't
have anybody to help them so they depended on this var you know which was off site support
and the way the system was originally set up it was multi-user but they didn't even have
user names.
They were logging in as programs like they would log in as AP or they would log in as AR
for accounts receivable or things like that and so the system had no idea their user identities
or anything because that was the way the var set it up so I was you know going into that
environment I was terrified of like I cannot believe they had to set up this way so the
very first thing I did was assign log in names to everybody and teach people how to have
a real password and then I set up email and then we set up word processing and all this
on the Alto's 2000 system.
So you were in and it went from the beginning there at the hospital?
Definitely well I'm not that old I'm not from the beginning of the facility but definitely
from the beginning of computer usage and as you probably guessed we followed an upgrade
path that led to another Alto system, Alto's 15,000 and that upgraded to Alto's Unix instead
of Xenix and then after that we upgraded to a, it wasn't, oh actually that was SCO Open
Server or SCO ODT now SCO yes.
Now remember back then SCO was not a dirty word they were just another Unix distribution
that was what you're thinking of nowadays you know it was the SCO group which is what
became what was left of SCO after Linux pretty much took over SCO's marketplace but you
know it was it was a capable operating system and you know people would make fun of it
especially Solaris people you know a little toy, the toy Unix but we would use that until
we had upgraded to an HP 15,000 and I think that was also running SCO ODT then we upgraded
to, we used after, oh from that point we moved into Linux so which is what a lot of businesses
did. In fact at the time Linux had backwards compatibility with SCO Open Server because
it could run Xenix binaries and also I 386 cough binaries I don't know if anyone remembers
those but I've never heard of them.
I could actually run some of the programs that directly without recompiling them so that
or getting a different version from the vendor so that worked out really well and we've
been Linux ever since so I'm not, you're not going to find very many businesses that have
always used Unix Linux. We're probably one of the very few that we just never left. A lot
of companies were romanced by the whole PC type architecture and not that we haven't had
a few in the building you know for specific purposes but, and Windows in K, well fortunately
we never really tried to get into that but yeah their first Microsoft's first 4a and
2 multi-user was not very romantic and not very pretty. Reminds me of some of the Citrix
type stuff that later came built on NT and it was just not very good. It's of course
improved dramatically since then but my point was that we just never, it's not that we
defected and left any other platform we just, unless you want to think of going from Unix
to Linux as a different platform.
It's dipped in an organic development from Unix to Linux rather than leaving home and
then coming back to the body of a child chasing them hungry.
That's right and of course you know we have, it's always fun to have auditors come in
you know or something and they're looking at our systems trying to figure out what they
are and being completely baffled you know. So yeah we always get surveys you know
which email server do you use and it's like well we don't it's just you know PostFix it's
just part of Linux well where's your print server it's like we don't have a print server
or an email server or login server or a web server as they're all that box right there and they're
like what do you mean? I said well the whole hospital runs on this one box and this is way before
you know IBM came along and with their virtualization you know they're big thing on Linux and
they had this fun ad where they had this big room and said oh the servers are gone the servers
are gone I don't know if did you ever see that one and the police came in and and I can't say I
remember it but I am very good at turning out ads and all sorts. I am too especially with Tivo
another Linux powered device but the whole room was empty and there's nothing but this one
little computer in the corner and they were saying oh it's all running on that now yeah so that
was when I yes believe it or not IBM was was heavy into pushing Linux at one time on their
virtualize machine so but philosophically I think of everything it's more than just the fact that
we run Linux it's also a centralized system which is another unusual didn't used to be unusual
you know when I came up with computers the idea of sharing a computer among many different people
was logical. I remember when I was at my first job out of college it was a fairly large organization
and among other things they have an economist some economist on staff to do projections and the
like I got to be friendly with one of them and I remember him taking his phone handset and putting it
in the old cradle like to get what they're called as a acoustic modem couple and dialing up the
time share on some main frame was located god knows where somewhere else where in the city yeah
that was that was very common back then and what I think is interesting is that the philosophically
it centralized versus distributed computing has always been there and a pendulum swings between
being distributed and being and being centralized and moves back and forth they both have
wonderful advantages and disadvantages and of course there are hybrids because no system is
purely you know centralized are purely distributed if you look at your computer your laptop that
you're using right now you might think well this is a very you know distributed type system it's
your own computer but nowadays you know a computer not connected to a network and sharing
with the internet and the rest of the world seems kind of ludicrous but that's again if you use
any kind of web-based mail that's a very centralized concept if you have anything in the cloud
you know like email I mean that mean all the files or music or anything like that that's all
centralized if you use amazon to order things that's even the concept of a website it's very
centralized you're going back to a single server or a set of servers that look like a single server
so at like Taylor where just we are a centralized system where we use essentially ex-terminals
because we had we had evolved from ASCII terminals or text-based terminals to ex-terminals
back when tectronics I don't know if you remember them but they made ex-terminals the whole concept
of x11 the ex-windowing environment is network transparent and network-based and was essentially
designed for the idea of sharing expensive mainframe type computers with graphical desktops it was
just an evolution of going from text-based to graphical-based and x is very elegant for that
and people forget nowadays especially with all this wailin thing don't get me started on that you
know how I feel about wailin I mean I think the network transparency and the network functions
within the windowing environment it's very important for reasons that a lot of people don't
understand the history of and of course we use that right now actively and it's as simple as
set up an ex-server and and just pointed at the the display manager the xdm manager which is my
centralized computer and bam you get a login screen you login all the programs run on the server
well server and client are a little confused and ex you know when you say ex-server it's actually
running on your machine close to you so Mark how do you feel about wailin oh well you're going
to pull me into that huh that's in one minute or less and you tell us what you think about wailin
I'm not opposed to the idea of course of moving forward things change and I'm like a lot of people
on twag I'm somewhat conservative especially because I've been around computers so long
people come along and just say well there are problems with x11 doesn't do this or doesn't do
that or so let's just throw it out and design something brand new and oh by the way it'll be
backwards compatible so you can run your x-based programs under wailin it's like well it's not
that simple because the moment that something else starts taking over like wailin popular programs
such as Firefox or whatnot may not be available as an x-based version anymore and those people that
choose to use x because they're using a centralized system or they're like their network transparency
and they can launch programs remotely and very efficiently through ssh or however they want to manage
their systems will be denied access to that program because either that or you'll have different
versions you'll have a wailin version and you'll have an x-version it's kind of the way the
approach that Apple used you know they didn't as you know they're their Unix-based kernel but they
didn't use x11 as their windowing environment they they was based on next and display post-crypt
at the time and they created incompatibilities now yes they have an x-server so you can run x
programs but all the Mac programs are going to be essentially designed to Mac right just to use
on Mac so it's it's good for them but it's not good for anyone else it makes it difficult so
as a developer if you're a developer program that was written in C and used some standard libraries
it might be easy to port that to front two or from Mac OS to Linux or another Unix
except for the fact that the windowing environment is completely different.
See I don't have to have the background to look at in that level of detail my feeling about
wailin is pretty much out if it ain't broke don't fix it and as near as I can tell x-8 broke
but I think you provide some information and perspective here that a lot of people will find
interesting useful. Well again it's a matter of just going back in history you know x has been
around a long long long long time initially designed I think by Xerox and that maybe I think it's
at 40 years old it's well it's as old it's almost as old as Unix but not quite that old you know
Unix is back in 1968 1967 eight nine depending on your definition of when when Unix was created
because you could it was evolving and you could point at anything in between that early timeline
say well that's where Unix really began but the idea of having a graphical console you know came
several years later and X was developed now when I first started using X it wasn't X 11 it was
X 10 not to be confused with those annoying home controller people that pop up on your screen but
I don't remember all of my history memories not as good as it used to be but I don't remember
there being an X nine or X eight you know I don't know why if it just jumped to that or whether
I'll just show my ignorance there I just can't remember but just to let you know I mean I've been
using X for way over 20 years I think since probably before that and it's always been was X 10
at the time until it became X 11 and then even then you have like X 11 release three release four
release five release six what are we up to now release seven I think X 11 R6 it was for
longest time it was X 11 R6 and of course you remember the whole Xorg versus X86 debacle
I actually started using Linux just about the time that change over was around 2005 and I think
that change over was kind of coming to a completion about that so I don't have the experience
with the previous iterations oh that's a wonderful story about how about how open source works
to watch what happened with Xorg versus X3 86 because X3 86 was the X server implementation
that was used by not just Linux but BSD you know all the free Unixes and it wasn't being
developed fast enough it wasn't being pushed and so it was forked and that's how Xorg was created
and pretty much Xorg just took over it's very similar to the kind of forking that you see with
like open office and forking into Libre office so again that's what makes Linux and open source
very powerful is the ability to to keep things open and to have forks but it's also it's downfall
you know when it comes to compatibility and lack of centralized control can sometimes hurt you
know having a vision and moving in a certain direction so that this is that pendulum I love
going back to the pendulum analogy that everything is that's a good tieback isn't it to come back
to that everything life philosophically swings from one direction to another as people discover
and rediscover the past and and look forward to the future and just to put that back into the frame
of Lake Taylor we use X because it works for us and it's not always the easy path as you can imagine
trying to get Linux based accounting software and other things sometimes can be very difficult
but it's also very cost-effective I haven't heard that that's one area in open source
problem source tends to be weak because the classic saying is that where does an open source
program come from it comes from a developer scratching his own itch and a lot of geeks don't have
an itch to develop accounting software or a CAD software right and there it's not to say that
there aren't accounting based packages there there are but there are so many individualized
markets out there in health care you know if you can imagine building an accounts receivable it's
very complicated and every time insurance companies change a policy a procedure is going to
cascade that down into the building and the accounts receivable yes and so they're they're it's
hard to keep up with it and it's not that our industry is any more complicated than in the other
industry each industry has their own very specific requirements when it comes to different types
of software and when you look at the market now you know where the market used to be 90%
unix and now it's it's easily 90% Windows based so you as a developer trying to make software to
make money to survive in a business environment you're going to target those markets that are
going to make you the most money and that is not Linux and so sometimes that hurts us
sometimes it doesn't sometimes it's the most cost effective method and sometimes it isn't
we're not purely Linux based at lateau we do have a Windows 2008 server running Citrix
and it's still centralized so there are a few applications that we use on that that we couldn't
simply could not get for Linux but our preferred choice would be Linux based and then preferred
over that would be open source over commercial but again that's another complicated argument
that we could get into but I don't think people want to hear that you know as to you know whether
commercial or open source they both have their advantages and disadvantages I think if any audience
is interested in hearing arguments like that would be the audience or hacker public radio now
I'll follow you live your lead and move on won't go there going back to your background were you
using Linux well obviously not Linux because it hadn't it wasn't around when when you got into
working for Lake Taylor but were you using units or before you started working with Lake Taylor or
well if we rewind all the way back to I'm from Richmond I'm not from Hampton Roads originally
and my first real computer was the Tandy or TRS 80 color computer one the old trash 80 don't call
it TRS 80 I hate it when people did that especially people using craped doors remember that's it
called Commodore um well yeah my first computer was a cocoa one it had 4k of RAM
cassette player you know to record your your programs and play them back or store them because
it didn't have a floppy drive those were way too expensive back then I had several other little
intermediate computers you know I'd mess with the timeics and clear I played with a lot of other
things that candy model one friend of mine they had a model two and a model three was like
woo and the model three came out that's about the same time I think it was the two or the three
is when the cocoa one came out and it was a great beginning I was only 11 years old so wow
it's it's amazing how far we've come in just one person's lifetime of course I'm not saying
that I'm gonna die anytime soon I hope not but but you look back at you know a flash key that
can store hundreds of gigabytes in this little teeny chip that you can fit on the on one of your
fingernails that would just have blown me away back then when we were struggling with 4k of RAM
trying to trying to fit things in and then when the 16k version came out it's like oh my god
we'll never need 16k of RAM I can imagine that much storage space or that much working area for your
programs I believe and when I was 11 years old color television was new not
though anyone that's listing ones to to date how old we are but I guess it'll probably be
apparent you know by since I wrote down some of these dates as to how we progressed now you're
currently using red hat I think for your network it like Taylor oh yeah we're using rhl we
recently converted so so what is your personal favorite distro for your homies oh lord I see
you wanted to jump off the history and go straight into the meat as you know politically as in
twig I'm trying to be as distro neutral as possible because and find why is she succeed yeah I'm I
I believe that all distros all Linux distros have their advantages and disadvantages and there's
a distro for everybody sometimes there's more than one distro for everyone currently I lean and
it depends on the the purpose for example at work we use rhl and sent us and scientific Linux
primarily on the servers on the desktops which are mostly being used as thin clients anyway
we're converting to fedora right now but we've used several other operating systems there
at home actually let me just I'll just rewind the history because that won't work me right up to it
the cocoa one well I end up getting a cocoa two and then the cocoa three when the cocoa three
hit they were using an operating system it became available then if you had a hard drive which
was amazing you know to have a hard drive god oh yeah oh we were using something called os9
and os9 was fantastic and what's interesting about os9 is a lot of the concepts in os9 came
from unix so it was in a weird sort of way very unixy and so that set me up for the stage of being
more and more fascinated with that in 1987 I graduated from high school and moved to Norfolk to attend
O2U and I was on the never-ending plan you know it took me like seven years to to get out of there
oh the ultimate in university yes and you know they had unix machines a lot of salaris
stuff that was sonos at the time they didn't have salaris you know that didn't come out until later
um but the first linux distro I used see I started late till at 89 and then you know it's forced
I would say I shouldn't say for us but it was required to use zinix because that's what we had
and of course like a lot of people at the time I wanted to be able to use it at home also
and I'd already built an x86 machine but there were you know back then there were no free or open
or easy to obtain versions of unix or zinix they were all commercial and tremendously expensive now
if you were school you could get either free or very reduced prices but for home there just wasn't
an option so there's a lot of talk about minix and other things that that would be available but
nothing really really happened until linux hit the scene now I was able somehow it was that I got
some kind of clearance version of interactive unix so that was my very first unix that I had at home
and it worked quite well they didn't include x so I remember oh my god this was funny I remember
having to download x from from school because you know they're the only ones that had an internet
connection at the time that were universities and I downloaded it and put it on a tape and got it
at home and I had to borrow a tape drive to actually download it because I think it was something
ridiculous like I don't know is 10 or 15 megabytes which at the time which is oh my god you know
huge exactly so but I got it working and that really got me very interested around the same time
you know linux was coming out and wasn't quite stable yet but as soon as it became good enough
to use I think it was soft landing systems or SLS I remember downloading just reams of floppies
it just took forever on these bbs's and stuff to try and get these floppies later came UECP you know
to trying to use unix units copy to get these things off of what was the precursor of the internet
or was what the precursor of to what we think of as the internet now precursor to the worldwide web
yeah essentially and oh just floppy after floppy after floppy after floppy for soft landing systems
and that was a little restrictive and then slackware came out of course and then I moved to slackware
and then I moved to redhat and was really impressed redhat put a lot of effort into polishing it
and getting it to be a very useful and easy to install distro if that's all relative you know easy
we look at it now it's like oh god it's been many many many many many hours trying to get x to work
or something and nowadays you just slap it in it seems like most things work now I left I was
increasingly frustrated with redhat mandrake came out at the time and was based on redhat and
they made a wonderful distro and switched to mandrake and started using that and as you know they
their name changed through time and then to mandrava and that's what they are now as mandrava but
I still use what's now magia which is the fork which is the open fork of mandrava so I'm using
magia on my desktop right now and I like it it's it's nice but I've used many other distros to
depending on what purpose for example on this ee computer that I have here I'm we're actually
using an ee to record my voice now especially impressed with the aces ee pc I think this is
1,000 when it came out it was the first true netbook you know they invented the netbook category
and it came with linux and it came with uh was that the one with that the linux light oh yeah it had
some awful I don't know what it was I nearly took it off and installed something else but I don't
I really don't remember which linux came on it it was definitely not for me I think it came with
a crippled version of the door that was called linkedless light I think it was lin's fire or
something lin's fire I don't know it's there've been several attempts yeah I didn't get a netbook
until I was able to get one from Dell and it came with a boot 2 and now it's trying to get a netbook
with linux on it from Dell is like trying to pull it through yeah but I quite like I'm running
sale it so that's on that one now I'm very happy with it as a netbook well you can use
a brother thing too but it works like a charm on my netbook and it got the the broad I could
was able to get the broadcom wireless working very easily with instructions on the sale to website
and it well it's based on slackers so of course it doesn't work and I would uh I didn't tolerate
the desktop that was installed very quickly because they they wanted to dumb down for your
your user they didn't understand what linux was or didn't care you know they just want a cheap
computer that worked um so yeah I dumped that and installed I think it was e e boom 2 at the time
and that worked very well um and I used that for a few years and was upgrading that through
different versions and then I went to just a plain new boom 2 after that on it and then I switched
it over to fedora um and surprisingly that worked well too so because by this time I mean we all
know this from linux is especially with laptops and new hardware it's it can be a nightmare when
you buy a new machine with new chipsets and things because you know they haven't made it into the
kernel and you so the early days of of any laptop is difficult but after a few years all the
distros had support for it so you could install anything you want. I remember having to use
indistrapper to get a wireless PC and CIA card working uh and it worked then I had to then I
upgraded the computer to a newer version of slotware and the indistrapper didn't work anymore
but it can be flaky but yeah for a long time wireless we'll see it's really sealed uh linux
putting linux on a laptop. Yes in fact that was the big thing because if you couldn't get on
the network there was pretty much no point in using the machine and nobody wanted to be tethered by
an ethernet cable it's nice to have but it's not what you want to primarily use an
affordable machine. Yeah exactly it's not it takes away affordability. So did I answer your question
I think I did. We covered the ground yes uh going back to 12 the typewriter unit user for
what are some of the services that 12 provides to its members. Well that's very over time but
other than a set of ability going to a room and when you talk about computers you're talking
with people who actually know what Etsy slash f-stab means. Yes well it is it is refreshing if
you haven't if you've never been to a unix or linux users group before um especially if
linux interests you you know to be around other people that kind of know it know what you're going
with that. I'll probably rewind and give you a little history on twig so that you can see how it's
evolved. I'm really curious about because I know it's been around a long time. Well I posted you
know this stuff is on our website but you know I'll sometimes sometimes nobody wants to read that
they want to they just want to listen you know that way you can listen to this in the car or whatever
but um I did not form twig I was there within the first year of its formation um I you know when I
started working at Lake Taylor uh well just to rewind back in Richmond I was very active in a
users group that that helped to form called Rayco which was the Richmond area color computer
organization and you know having left there moved here and also you know getting into the whole
unix thing I was looking for a users group. I think I found I'm not sure we were called twig at
the time I think it just kind of stuck um I can't remember exactly when that phrase was coined.
Well it's easy to pronounce it's easy to remember so that gives your leg up.
It does confuse some people nowadays you know when they say you know well I don't want unix I want
Linux well you know obviously you know Linux is Linux and unix go hand in hand but we didn't
want to rename the group and besides you can't pronounce something that would be like the
tie-border Linux users group would be to a log you know it'd be kind of weird or it could
well be to log and there's some other history involved in that but um so I did discover them I
think it through probably through ODU I think there was somebody there that knew somebody that knew
someone that put up a flyer that knew somebody else and um that this new users group was just
forming called twig and it was meeting at several different locations I would give um when was
1989 I would credit probably Tom Manos as being driving force behind the creation of the group
and like most developers you know if you have a if you have an itch you know you try to do try
to make a scratch to go with it and I think he probably had need for at the time having more
support for unix and getting together with other people in the community to try and share knowledge
and learn and um because uh Tom Manos was forming a company called Wyvern Technologies which I'm
not sure if you remember that but um Bill Roberts was also instrumental he just died recently
unfortunately I remember something um the website right there right and he he was instrumental in
the early days also um but we we would meet there's a very small group you know you might have five
or six people and it started growing um oh I remember one of the the key things that happened
with twig at the time was to try and get on what was the internet or what would be the internet
and the way the only way you could do that like I said earlier was through universities
and this was all happening at the same time I was going to ODU which was interesting
now they they had a real connection you know through I guess what I'm not sure if it was still
called DARPA net at that point but for anyone else on the friend is trying to get access you
would go through your local university using u usp which was the unix unix copy it's primarily for
email so Wyvern Technologies which was the company that was forming to almost be like an internet
service provider um Tom Manos bought a high-speed modem for ODU and ODU provided a u usp live connection
back to their server so that became kind of the price of admission was you buy them a modem and
and they would be happy you had to buy two you know one for yourself and one for them and they would
give you a connection because you know the universities were interested in trying to spread this
and getting out into the community and this is before the days really of internet service providers
and that's what Tom was forming which later became infinet as you probably know infinite which was a
major you know local internet service provider in Hampton roads with lots and lots of modems
modems were the way that people connected back then and anyway um we would call that the Wyvern
area of our of our group you know because we met at Wyvern and then later physically met at
infinet was their building and the group grew and we had more and more people and we also had
Lyman Bird who's another historic figure of twag um and later Ken Long also joined and they both
worked for Metro machines and they're a local company that uses Linux and they hosted our first
twag website and what was going to be the mail list so I believe our original mail list was
getting back to the internet through u usp and it was crazy because you had to use all these
I don't know if you remember this but back before there was like mark at you know so-and-so dot
so-and-so dot org as an email address you'd have to use bangs so you'd say like
wyvern dot chrysanthemum or chrysanthemum dot odu dot cs dot edu bang wyvern bang
twag bang something bang and that's how you'd have to actually route to this mail from one point
to another it was it was complicated I don't remember that at all I was probably
just starting to cut my teeth with bbs's yes now bbs's were still popular yes this was going on all
you know bbs's have been around a long long time but yeah that was primarily the way that people
were communicating was through bulletin boards the idea of having live push as you would think
of it now or push email where email just comes on its own to your machine was was a fascinating
concept that that bulletin boards couldn't quite do and anyway they hosted that for for years and
later we had a lock keep martin join in with um
gerry massie it's another name that's kind of you know key name at twag
and so we would rotate the group meetings between lock keep martin and chesapeake and
infinite and norfolk so one month we'd have it one next month we have it the other
and then later uh you know there's sometimes you'd have conflicts and couldn't get the meeting
rooms and stuff so that's how I got involved is you know we needed a meeting place and so I said well
you know you could meet at late tailor I don't have a problem with that so I offered a meeting room
there and so then we'd have a three-way rotation and then or it could have been like the time
infinite was not available or or Tom was not available to to be with the group for a while and I
think you know without somebody hosting it that's from that organization it makes it more difficult
because you know a lot of lugs meet at libraries and other public places but a lot of those public
places weren't suitable back then because they didn't have an internet connection or they don't
have a projector or they don't have a lecture style meeting room you know or they have dues you
don't have to pay pay to use the room you know that kind of thing or they have very restrictive
times or dates that are available for when you could have the meetings you have you have to leave
when the library closes and things like that and you know our target target audience are people
that that mostly are working so unless you're going to have the meeting on a weekend you want to
have it probably on a weeknight and that means that it'll be after work after dinner you know so
you have to be available a little bit longer so you know rotated between Lockheed Martin and
Lake Taylor and then eventually Lockheed Martin dropped out of the picture because of we had a
lot of security problems you know this is if you look back at the years at all terrorism thing and
so it got harder and harder to get to get into to Lockheed Martin and so it was just decided a
little I had no trouble with them just meeting at Lake Taylor permanently and so that's what's
happened so for many years now it's been just at Lake Taylor I one thing I noticed about 12 because
I'm primarily a slapwear user which I think makes me part of my minority a lot of folks seem to be
frightened of slapwear but I notice there's a high percentage of slapwear users in 12 why do you
think that might be well I'm not sure I mean of course a lot of them seem to be the old Unix heads
exactly and I think that again we have a large what I would say conservative group of people that
have been around a long time and they can have been using different distros and people are more
conservative tend to not like things like Ubuntu they'll probably gravitate more towards the older
distros like slapwear or red hat even mandriva at this point would I guess would be considered
an old distro that means where I use on my pulse every home yeah that means been around a long time
and it's we have at twag we have you know every possible kind of person you can imagine and
there there is no one our audience you know we have people that that work people that don't people
that go to school people that are young old of every nationality race religion age gender yeah
hardware hackers software hackers yeah and it's just it's in pot real hackers yeah and I'll tell
you that's one of the more difficult things about twag yeah we have had people that are programmers
and people who do this for living people that just do it as a hobby people that are beginners
people that are experts it's difficult to have one group that meets the needs or expectations
of everyone and well it's just impossible yeah it's impossible even try and I think someone
is interested in a group like twag or any other hobbyist or interest groups runs they either
have been willing to accommodate aspects of that interest they're not particularly interested in
for the larger sense of being part of the community right it's if it can be very difficult to
find topics that are interesting plus I'm kind of burned out because I've been doing this for so
many years since 1989 a lot of times people won't step forward to give presentations I know you've
given several presentations and I appreciate that and we always are looking for more people to
present on all different kinds of levels or topics but a lot of times it comes down to me having
to give a presentation at every single meeting and there's just only so many things I can talk about
but I know some of the most interesting things for my standpoint have been to watch whether
was no topic yes and people started talking about you know what just what was bothering them at the
moment whether it's a problem on their computer and sometimes those are the the needs with the highest
amount of laughter and fun that's true especially at my expense you know that people love to tease me
but don't be too hard on yourself they'll do that for you now I've done that several times a
nervously at first you know where we just didn't have a topic because a lot of members were
well I don't want to drive out there and be there if you're not going to have a a pre-arranged
you know a schedule of who's going to talk about what and why and I can certainly appreciate that
but at the same time some of these open meetings have been I think one of the some of the most
enjoyable ones because you'll get people talking that don't normally talk and I don't want each
meeting to be just one way where a speaker is presenting and and people are listening and then maybe
there's a question answer session if you're lucky and then that's it and you go home a few
meetings have been that way only because of time constraints or what's covered but the
interactivity of bringing people in and who has a question or what's what's a topic we can talk
about and it can be off the wall because again the typewriter Unix users group our mission is not
just Linux or Unix it's also free and open source software and there's so many devices that use
Linux now and open source software I mean Android is the world's number one platform for mobile
experience devices now and that's that's Linux based so we don't want to drag it down into being
an Android users group but having that in the mix is interesting people talk about Google or what
they're doing and knowing that they have hundreds of thousands of servers that are all Linux based
so there's a lot of different topics so what are some you mentioned the website what are some of
the other services 12 for Linux well we've had a website for a long time and we tried you know it
is a wiki and that didn't work out so well when it came to contributions we did have some people
contribute to it like Matthew Philpot I know don't want to say that there weren't people that put
a lot effort into it but we had some problems with spamming and it just didn't work out quite so
well of course we've always had the mail list which has been the most important thing recently we
just added a discussion forum which is based on PHPbb and that was could have been a little controversial
but I think it's been going quite well it's just still in its infancy right now we have 26 people
that have signed up for it I'm always asked well how many members are there in 12 and it's
hard to say you know a lot of organizations have dues or and we don't have dues that's one of
the things I've never wanted to do is to have any kind of charge we've made money that we needed to
in the past by selling discs or by doing little fundraiser things if we needed to but we've never
really needed money because no well if one thing you don't have to pay for a meeting room and for
a lot of organizations like 12 the meeting room and paying for meetings is the biggest expense either
that or hosting hosting services can be expensive too but those have been donated also Metro's
machine has been doing it like I said for many years at no cost I've now since moved that over
to Lake Taylor so the servers are now there and Lake Taylor is providing the bandwidth and the
server so which is good it's good for Lake Taylor is good for the community it's good for 12 it's
good for all of us and I like that these services can be free and but I think you know the whole
point of twig is not that although I say the the mailing list or the forums you know are a major
benefit of twig I would think that the most important thing is the monthly meeting and the reason I
say that is because you know what the internet the way it is now there are hundreds of of of
lugs thousands of lugs all over all over the world and you know you can go to a forum or discuss
your group like linuxquestions.org and just have thousands thousands of thousands of people asking
and answering questions and their blogs their how-tos um there there even some online
blogs that meet regularly using like mumble I know Linux basics has an online blog that meets before
they record their weekly podcast. Oh yeah I mean nowadays you could use Google Hangouts you could
use all kinds of things but I try to encourage people or try to remind people then in the past having
a meeting was was required it was the only way you could really effectively communicate and learn
that's not true anymore but I think that's what makes twig special is its physical so you're actually
going to a place and meeting people and reading people's expressions and getting the vibe of the
room and staying after the meeting to talk to somebody about something geeky or asking for help
on something specific. A virtual meeting however much good will and feeling as there is in it is
still virtual and it's not quite the same aspect it's an attempt to recreate the face-to-face
experience because people need know they need the face-to-face experience but it's not I'm not
the same maybe when we all have holographs of ourselves uh as we can all go to the holodeck for our
love meeting uh it will be the same but yeah I agree I just I come not because of what I might
learn at the meetings because oftentimes the meeting don't address anything that's really
new to me or alternatively it addresses something that's so far into what I'm interested in I just
don't care uh like a match presentation about the deserve a game right thing I you know I
I do not a gamer so I'm not interested yeah I decide long ago I wasn't going to be a gamer
because I don't have the time to get good and I'm already media over at enough things so I don't
want to add another thing to that list right uh I think we're we've been going quite nicely here
for quite a while like I one question though I think a lot of HDR listeners would also be
interested in this though it's not um it's not about Linux but you recently gotten a Windows 8
computer I understand yes as someone who's proficient in using both since because we we're talking
the other day and you mentioned you always kept a Windows computer on hand because there are
sometimes things you have to do that require that operating system and I I keep one on hand too
actually it's quite a nice computer except for the operating system what's your first impression
of Windows 8 well um I have to say that there are some things that are really flashy and very
interesting especially um I mean I'll just preface this by saying my last home portable machine
was an EE that was actually the EE PC I was talking about earlier the EE 1000 and you know that's
several years old now and it's time for something a little bigger um I needed a high resolution
screen more memory faster processor and I've been just kind of looking to see what was available
and something caught my fancy it was a Lenovo twist which is one of these new touch screen
ultra books and it has a flippable screen where you can twist it around and put it flat use it
as a tablet or not I'm not sure if I'll ever use that feature but it's just seemed like a
nice thing to have I compared lots of different machines um the Lenovo wanted my mind only because it
had a real ethernet port it had which was I was looking for um it had a quality build it had
enough memory there was an 8 gig memory option where most of them were four and I really wanted
to solid state hard drive just like I have in this EE um no moving parts not more reliable and
faster so I opted for that knowing of course that it was going to come with with Windows 8 whether
I wanted or not now I'm very outspoken about that I think that you know uh there's nothing wrong
with wanting to use MS Windows if that's what you want to use but I think it's really wrong that
it's almost impossible to buy a machine of your choice without having to pay the Microsoft tax you
know um that said you know I've always had some machine somewhere around that has Microsoft Windows
on it a perfect example is my Sony DSLR camera you know I need to do a firmware update though they
don't give you any other way to do that except with a Windows program and so I have to have some
access somewhere even if it means going to someone else's house but I don't want to have to
inconvenience somebody else just to do that um otherwise I'd say I spend all my time you know
like my main computer here at home doesn't have Windows on it at all so but I still have that
an old laptop that has that on it now it's aging too it's like Windows XP service pack two or
something so I expect at some point those little utility programs I may occasionally run into that
need to run won't even run on that um so I thought having a dual boot wouldn't hurt this in this
case being forced to buy the license it could be useful um but you know I opened the thing up and
was playing with it and man they've really changed user interface it's it's a radical departure from
from Windows 7 from XP or Vista you know we forget that Vista exists but it really did um
I think that there are some parts of it that are extremely frustrating especially from someone
that wants to just get certain tasks done like I wanted to know how could I repartition the drive
how can I see this how can I do that I can't even find an additional start menu you have to search
for things in order to find anything um of course you know coming from I'm used to jumping from
different desktops you know KDE and gnome and and LXDE and different environments and different
distros so I can be frustrated pretty easily but at the same time I think I'm pretty flexible I'm
used to working with a lot of different machines but even I was thrown for kind of a loop um and
that's on top of all the extreme complications because you know my first objective is to
repartition the thing and get Linux on it because that's what I want to use on my on my new machine
and in order to do that oh I spent countless hours trying to understand this
it's very oppressive licensing scheme that Microsoft has gotten into bed with all their OEMs
and forcing them to turn secure boot on and they the Windows key is now stored in the BIOS
it's not stored on the on the machine and um and you know a lot of us have known that was coming
since it first got publicized about nine months or a year ago right I knew it was coming too but
it was one of those things where I figured at by the time it became a problem or I needed to deal
with it somebody else would have sought have the solution well surprised I did find out by
complete accident I'm just lucky you know because I couldn't get this information from Lenovo
unfortunately um that you know you can turn off in the Lenovo you can turn off secure boot
and it looks like so far I haven't successfully installed Linux on it yet because I just got it
yesterday I'm still working on it but it looks like you can turn off secure boot and still boots
windows um but oh my god it's got like six partitions on it with all these weird names that I've
never seen before I don't know what they're for that's up to from Windows 7 come before right so
at least Lenovo's version of it came with six and I'm not gonna list them all now because this
but you know just trying to sit there and go through different forms to figure out what are these
and can I get rid of it and because it's so locked down in the BIOS with the EFR e e e f i
BIOS situation you have the legacy BIOS you have the new BIOS you have with it locked with it not
locked you have the boot loader and the way it's tied to it it took me an hour just to find out
where to make a system recovery disk for this thing which was difficult in other words as a
knowledgeable experienced computer user of many different operating systems it would be
fair to say that you find Windows 8 to be a real pain in the anatomy oh yeah and the other
thing that was shocking was you know is buying a I knew it didn't have a lot of storage space
as 128 gig solid state but when you find out that only what was it like 50 gigabytes are available
50 to 60 after all the the crap that's loaded I mean they've they've all made their molded
well they divided it up into all these little partitions you know and they had the recovery
partition in this and that the other and there wasn't as much junkware on there as I expected
probably because I just didn't have space but you know what I would want to do typically is get
rid of the partitions I don't need you know the traditional way of doing this make it as small as
possible we move all the crap make a back up of it repartition it down real small and then
have Linux take over the rest of it and use that primarily but I I'm just I'm I find frustrated
and I know what I'm doing I guess most people look at it and it's just pretty you know you've got
your you can use a gesture since it is a touch screen based one you can flip things around it
but as soon as you try to start doing anything a little more complicated than then touching
something and pulling something up it becomes frustrating so well this this Windows 7 computer I got
which was was it gift from someone I did a lot of blog posts to his website for him over
to generate more content for a number of years and he had one of these ball into his hands
it's a gorgeous tablet touch screen the touch screen work just flying under meant by the way
but when you get beneath the glitz of the much wanted arrow desktop and the visual effects underneath
it doesn't look much different from Windows nt4 I want to thank you very much I appreciate time
I've learned a lot in talking with you and I need one who's stitched with it through
course of this conversation I think we're learning a lot I'll make sure that in the show notes
there will be links to the 12 website and forum so if anyone's interested because the website
and the forum and the mailing list are certainly not limited to any particularly geographical
area and thank you very much for your time well thank you I appreciate you're taking the time to
further promote 12 and and Linux if you want to email me you can email me at frank
at pineviewfarm.net pineviewfarm is all one word no spaces no punctuation
and my website is www.pineviewfarm.net thank you very much
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