WooHoo! 10 years of FreeBSD

[David Kelly]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 08:33:16AM -0500, Josh Paetzel wrote:
> 
> I still have the FreeBSD 2.1.5 set from Walnut Creek that a friend had
> shipped to me after I expressed an interest to "learn unix"

I have a stack several feet high of WC FreeBSD disks. Forgot when I
started collecting, sometime between 2.2.5 and 2.2.8 IIRC.

I still have a yellow Post-It(Tm) note that I used as a label for the
floppy which had FreeBSD 2.0.5R boot/install disk.

> I sometimes wonder how different things would be if he'd been a linux
> fan and shipped me some slackware cds or something.

I was an Slackware Linux user, somewhere around the 99pl15 days.
Previously had been awe struck by the 386BSD series in Dr. Dobb's
Journal. Got my hands on a copy of 0.0, then 0.1, and was never quite
able to do useful work the way I could on SGI machines at work.

Someone mentioned Linux, so I tried it. Much more useful than 386BSD but
was still too much of a pain. Crashes often trashed my ext2fs
filesystems. The 3rd time one week when the filesystems were trashed
beyond repair I had heard of FreeBSD and thought to give it a try. Think
that was 2.0.0R, could have been 2.0.5R. No crashing. It was different,
then realized it was an updated 386BSD. Took about a week to realize I
was happy and had found my home. There were many things I could do on
SGI Irix *and* on my own computer! Amazing!

Have always been Apple based for consumer/office computing. When Apple
announced MacOS X would be Unix based, BSD based, heavily leveraging off
FreeBSD, I was in heaven.

This email composed in a Terminal.app window on MacOS X 10.5.2 via ssh
to mutt on FreeBSD 6.2. I rarely sit in front of my two FreeBSD
machines. One of which is working on a personal record uptime:

dkelly at AndrAIa {1005} uptime
 9:20AM  up 522 days, 16:58, 3 users, load averages: 0.02, 0.01, 0.00
dkelly at AndrAIa {1006} uname -a
FreeBSD AndrAIa.local 5.5-STABLE FreeBSD 5.5-STABLE #4: Fri Sep  8 14:39:36 CDT 2006 dkelly at AndrAIa:/home/obj/usr/src/sys/ANDRAIA  i386


-- 
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly at HiWAAY.net
========================================================================
Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.