I got started in Linux when I was in my teens and played with amateur radio and Packet Radio (AX.25) in particular, some time around 1999. Back then I wrote a lot of small programs that helped me in my hobby so I almost never coded the for the sake of coding, but to solve real problems. That led me into a very happy career of EE and CS. If I had not started playing with CB radios some time around 1995 things would probably have gone quite different, as (before that episode) I was dead set on becoming a carpenter.
Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
21–30 of 162 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
#22Installed Ubuntu on my Thinkpad in 2008 and never looked back.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
#23I'm 41, and have been using it for over 2 decades. It's always been a hobby. I work in a non-tech field, I have just liked it better than alternatives, and like the tinkering bit. It started about 1993, as a freshman at Bronx Science. The school's internet terminals ran AIX (IBM X Stations with these nice big 21" CRTs). Senior year, a friend gave me a CD from Walnut Creek. That was Slackware. Started playing with it,…
A walnut creek CDROM? Well look at the mr. millionaire here, I could not afford a CD drive at the time :) My first slackware install took like 5 hours of flipping floppies (40 or so) and haphazardly answering questions like "Do you want to install Python? Ruby? Guile? I don't know, do I?!?". I messed something up and the root password was not set properly. All I could do was spend another 5 hours reinstalling it and hope this time it would go right, so I did. I think on the same day I first ran vi, couldn't figure out how to type anything, or exit for that matter, so I ctrl-alt-deleted the computer :) I had just 4 megs of ram too, basically all the computer could do is boot to a shell so I could enable swap. Starting X swapped the hell out of it. Good times.
I honestly don't know if in this day and age I would take up Linux. Back then I did because I was bored, hungry for knowledge and was soaking in anything computer-related I could get my hands on. Linux provided so many new technologies to tinker with. With the cornucopia of freely and easily accessible knowledge that we have today... I don't know, maybe I would choose a different path altogether.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
#24I started going to 2600 meetings in the mid 1990s, which eventually lead to creating bots and similar tools for online chat platforms using VisualBasic 6. Then I switched focus from that to creating websites and launched a personal site on Geocities.
In the late 90s and early 2000s I started playing a lot of Quake 3 and built a gaming ladder with a friend (a free SAAS app basically) so groups of players can compete against each other. That kick started web development for me and even freelancing since it resulted in creating a lot of free (and some paid) sites for other gaming related things afterwards. Haven't looked back since.
My whole origins story is at https://gestaltit.com/exclusive/rich/nick-janetakis-it-origi....
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
#25Reading the comments here makes me feel old. I started with Linux over twenty years ago. Started as a teen. Continued to use it during my studies. Professional user during my PhD. Nowadays mostly at home.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
#26It was 1993 and I was homeless, living in a squat, working for bands by selling T-shirts at their gigs - I'd hitch hike to where they played to get paid £20 for the night before sleeping rough nearby. During this I collected names and addresses of their fans so that if the bands got new T-shirts there was the potential to contact the fans and let them know. One of the bands - Elastica - wanted to shoot a music video…
Wow.
Please share anymore stories if you have them, this was a fantastic read :)
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
#27It was 1993 and I was homeless, living in a squat, working for bands by selling T-shirts at their gigs - I'd hitch hike to where they played to get paid £20 for the night before sleeping rough nearby. During this I collected names and addresses of their fans so that if the bands got new T-shirts there was the potential to contact the fans and let them know. One of the bands - Elastica - wanted to shoot a music video…
You human, are inspiring!
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
#28In 2002 I installed widows xp and after 30 minutes of use I realized that Microsoft will never get their shit together. I'm on Linux ever since. Best Linux distro was Ubuntu 8.04, everything worked out of box, not even video tearing! It's downhill from back then but still good enough to stay. I'm using non mainstream wm so I'm not affected by fads anymore. I need to work, not change my habits on every os release.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
#29Back in the days of Windows 98, I got tired of the "blue screen of death" that my computer was giving me most days.
I heard Linux was more stable, so I ordered a physical copy of red hat and got it running. No more blue screens.
I still use Linux today as my main driver at work and at home.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?
#30I was a young programmer in the 80's, cut my teeth on CP/M and then Unix .. MIPS Risc/OS, when MIPS made pizzaboxen .. sufficiently productive to be able to afford my own home lab gear .. and in at work comes a brand new 386 system instead of the X Workstation I wanted, and which apparently 'solved the problems of the x86 platform' .. yeah, no. I found some respite in a Quarterdesk/Desqview configuration, multitasking DOS terminal sessions, but it was .. severely .. lacking in what I wanted.
So, at home, I got a copy of a similar 386 box set up, and did what everyone did at the time: got on USENET to find out what else could be done. GNU/Hurd was 'gonna happen any day now', and I'd already switched to using a bunch of gnu tools, but nothing was really working out .. which lead me to minix-list.
Which is where I read Linus' post about his little kernel project.
And, in the months and years to follow from that point, I became an avid Linux user. Not long after, I brought a bootable Yggdrasil CD into work, and turned my cruddy DOS 'workstation' into a viable X host, albeit after about 5 days of compiling ..