Throughout my life I’ve used a lot of different computers and operating systems. in 1988 I started with a commodore 64 machine. My friend had a c64 also – his had a cassette tape drive for saving and loading data – no hard drive, no floppy. Mine was a bit newer (and my dad was a bit more interested in computers) so we had a 1541 5¼" floppy drive – AND a “fastload” cartridge (look it up)

In the early 90’s in school I used Apple IIe to play oregon trail and to write “code” that will move a little triangle around on the screen and draw lines.

Later we had windows on an intel 286… 386… 486… pentium.. and pentium pro machines at home – all built by hand by me and/or my dad from parts we would buy at a local computer parts store, or a hamvention, or some kind of electronics flea-market / swap meet type of setting. It was a very exciting and dynamic time for computers! Everything was faster every time you checked. Modems went from 300 baud to 1200 to 2400 to 9600 to 14400 to 28800 – all in the span of a few years.

I continued using windows into the new millennium – even though I grew increasingly more frustrated with it. I tried running a few linux distributions over the years with limited success – Hardware support was ok but software was scarce.

Finally in 2006 I read that Apple was beginning to ship computers with intel processors which would more easily allow software to be ported from windows to run on OS X. Also there were a few mature virtualization projects like parallels that promised if you switched to mac you wouldn’t be completely out of luck if you really needed to run a windows app. So I went for it.

It was challenging at first, but quickly I fell in love with OS X. It was such a better experience than Windows provided. It was fundamentally different in a few key ways and at some point I opened the terminal and realized “Hey, this is a lot like linux!”

I view OSX as a well polished linux distribution – it’s not really, but it’s close enough. I used OS X for over a decade. After Steve Jobs passed I noticed apple’s innovation really started to slow down. I felt the hardware was overpriced and I didn’t like feeling “locked in” to buying it. I actually went and gave windows another try, but quickly remembered why I left in the first place (it’s even worse now). So I decided to give Linux another try.

This is basically like that moment in “2001 a space odyssey” where the hominids discover the Monolith and everything changes. One new discovery lead to another and another and eventually lead me here.

Now you know the backstory, stay tuned for my next post about what came next.