Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?

When I was little my family was gifted a 386 that, when it started up, produced a C:\> prompt and nothing more. I taught myself to do small things and I learned that a thing called BASIC existed but I didn't actually have much use for it.

Then one day I heard that a command called "win" existed, so typed it in and suddenly - and I remember the absolute excitement of that moment as if it was today and I am getting giddy just writing it down - the black and white screen exploded into the colors that is the windows for workgroup startup screen. Suddenly the mouse that came with it made sense!

Pretty sure that is the single most important event that steered me onto the path I have taken.

Then later I had PentiumIII running windows2000 and from somewhere aquired an ISDN card, put it in, rebooted, installed drivers, shut down to go to sleep, remembered I wanted to read something, booted up, shut down again, went to sleep, booted again in the morning only to be greeted by a bluescreen, that I wasn't able to fix - I would have to re-install Windows.

But I remembered that I had bought magazine that had something called "NetBSD" on a CD, so I thought I'd give that a go, and since then I have used the odd binarblobdriver, but my operating systems have been thoroughly open source and I've grown up to be a programmer - probably seeded from trying to manually install all dependency of X11 before I learned that pkgsrc is a "package manager".

But that splash of color really impressed me, and I am continued to be impressed how a machine that basically only knows how to turn on or off tiny little lamps in a grid took over the entire world.

That's a fantastic story, really. Thank you. Please do write up a long form of this and post it somewhere where it will last, so it can inspire others. If there ever was a 'hustle' story on HN this is it, much better than wanna-be growth-hackers and marketeers who are mostly selling themselves rather than their accomplishments.

In 1999, I was a new staff member at our work and everyone was using Windows. The company however bought an IBM AIX RISC 5000 machine that was sitting idle because nobody knew how to use it. They asked me to play with it. I read the manual and worked my way. That was my first encounter with UNIX. Around that time Linux was picking up. My experience with AIX made it easy for me to mess with Linux a couple years later.

Should be a requirement to add whether you’re a white guy or not to these stories.

Was Damon Albarn was Justine frishman of elasticas boyfriend at the time?

I remember Dave rowntree of blur also wrote some Linux drivers