Episode: 726
Title: HPR0726: Journey to Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0726/hpr0726.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:33:03

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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 in Kansas City and
going 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. 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 sun machines and
salaris 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 not 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 threats with say a thousand seats with people would you
base it on windows 3.1 or would you would 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 belts with
the 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 beat 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 in this time frame they made computers in
fact they were the only other people to use micro channel bus and we use
micro channel bus which was a vast improvement you might laugh now because it
didn't have wide adoption but it's a vast improvement over the ISA kinds of
bus machines that were of the time where you had to you know use a little dip
switches to set you know addresses for things things like that micro channel was
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 use micro channel in their business machines of the
time was NCR the reason why NCR had been discovered the small computer serial
interface and so the scuzzy interface patent was traded to IBM for the
micro channel micro channel bus patent and there's you know scuzzy found
wider adoption of course and micro channel bit by the way site 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 Macintosh as this is not OS 10 this is
back in the old OOS six so a seven 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 a 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 setup this 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 such a point you just tell me you know what this is I can I can
set it up on my on my Mac system it's like hearing loss here this is
actually back when I was setting up Macs and setting up ethernet back in the 80s
it was before DNF got invented as far as I know but for at least before it was
widely in use so static IPs were the rule of the day and you know you assign
those IP addresses to every single person out there and 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 is to do this is once again back in the
earlier pre-OS 10 Unix time today you 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 and 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 DNF 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's 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 Mac touch by hand and I
actually had one guy who calls me back and said you know about Mac
touch is right would you like help this other guy who has a Macintosh and I
don't have no idea what to tell him to do to be able to log in I actually
ended up trading for a month of service and and answered support questions for
him from Mac touch they call people and you've been set up on their system but
I kept on going through and going through and it was some of them actually gave
you 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 center in the first time it was in Houston
Texas I went to Houston Texas six times and 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 a window for 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 for now and we had three at the time and either at that Houston
store or at the Boston store which is that there's 333 memorial drive up in
Cambridge I know that for a fact because that was my address according to
micro center for years and finally when they put a micro center 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 set 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 the old gosh it was like within a week of it opening down
their south of Houston close to the space center of course has a space you know
and I was at the micro center there at the micro center and I came across this
chorale 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 dialogue right so you pretty much had to get CDs it wasn't even common to
have DVDs to find 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 to 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 science at lab there may still be a
Suci Linux or Suci Linux however it is pronounced I bought it was probably an
open package because that was usually my want on some of these things the
Boston store especially had some great open package kinds of things for 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 that pretty well tricked out as much as you could it had a removable
CD bay and I had a a replaceable hard drive that I could slip into that bay
and also a I could slip out the CD ROM drive and put in a very useful little
drive that would write to zip disks these the old 100 megabyte original zip
disks and that one stayed in there quite a bit and so I had the 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 windmode down which good luck
on that or whether it was a real modem ship those 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 command line but I was never going to get an
excellent dose of 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 needed because I couldn't afford
those but I was finding reusable buys for those used and they were very very thin
didn't have a drive include you'd have to have an external drive but you know
it was it was a viable solution I wanted something as minimal in terms of
weight if I'm going to carry a 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 you know
I had a command line but I really wasn't good to do the communications and I
wasn't good to get to do me and I did play around with sound with 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 little nicks along the way there in the
90s but that's not really running my desktop none of them ever actually stuck
and 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
real and the 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 that's 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 rediscovered Linux in the form of
muppets 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 1200
bhaj because I could read that fast and comprehend and not ever have to
go back or stop but 1200 bhaj was perfect for me 24th bhaj 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 this idea of having various concepts of getting high speed your house you
know 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 e-fibent port on it but the other thing it
had on it was a modem was 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 80 to 11b of course which was more than fast enough for how fast
that that dial up connection would go anyway this is Mr. Gadget'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 earnest fixing
my laptop problems with it and continuing on to use that as my dual boot
solution or choice up until right now we'll talk you later you be careful
out here on the on the you know technological frontier and I will be trailblazing
ahead of you bye now
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