No it didn’t sound arrogant at all - I feel the same and always like learning how to do new things. I didn’t mean to offend.
I’d never thought of that. I’m 63. Came to computing kind of late. I studied mathematics in the 80s, but didn’t see a use for computers at the time beyond a glorified calculator.
At 82 certainly not the eldest user. Never was primarily a computer person but always used them to solve problems starting with Fortran on an IBM 7090 and an Illiac II.
I watched the moon landing with a neighbor. We celebrated by hauling the brass cannon out of the basement, loading with black powder and wadded up toilet paper, and blowing burning paper all over the neighborhood a few times. Some beers will do that. No secondary fires were started.
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I’m 65. I remember the moon landing, but could not watch it live because New Zealand had no TV satellite link to the rest of the world. An air force Canberra bomber was sent to rush a video tape over from Australia.
My first exposure to computing was with Porta-Punch cards, cards with chads that could be poked out using a paper-clip. Eventually I studied Information Science writing Pascal on PDP-11, VAX-11/780 using VDUs, Fortran and COBOL on Burroughs B6700 using punch cards. I still have some punch cards, just for fun, I ported the code over to OpenSUSE.
I feel young at 61 now! Been using OpenSuse off and on the past few years but trying to stick with it because frankly, it just works.
I tried different distributions, but i mostly like OpenSUSE because i simply ended up having great chats/communications with others in the OpenSUSE community.
I started using GNU/Linux in late 1998 (Red Hat), and switched to openSUSE in the year 2000 timeframe. I mostly stopped using MS-Windows at home in 1998, although from 1999 onwards i did have to use different MS-Windows versions at work.
Now at age-71, I can not imagine a scenario where I would move back to MS-Windows, unless GNU/Linux development stopped.
I am very curious about the upcoming LEAP-16.0 (as I am curious if it will change the openSUSE experience). I suspect as long as there is an openSUSE i will remain an openSUSE user. I don’t know if I will live to age-91 like my mother managed.
One thing I find now, is in addition to great help on this forum, AI chat bots can help a lot in GNU/Linux, … not only in helping one to directly solve one’s GNU/Linux problems, but also helping one understand someone else’s suggested fix (on our forum). i.e. if an advanced user says try “A” and “B” to fix a problem, I can then describe to the chat bot that advanced user said try “A” and “B” to fix a problem and that I have no clue as to what they mean and why. More often than not, the AI chat bot will provide an understandable explanation. Of course the Chatbots are only language models and they can be wrong … but for an aging person, I find their immediate suggestions significantly speed up the completion of many mini-project I have.
They have helped me, as an aging person, to overcome some of the technology gap where technology is racing forward, and I find myself falling behind.
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I started my Linux journey around the same time ('98) but it was with Mandrake Linux. I know I tried RH back then because it was free but I didn’t stay with it. My path took me to many different distributions, some source based some binary. I stayed on Arch and Gentoo probably the longest but these days I don’t want to tinker much so OpenSuse does the trick.
I am currently using Tumbleweed on my main machine and it works well for me. I am a gamer and the things I play work well on TW. I did try Leap beta on my laptop but there was some reason I went back to Debian there - can’t recall at the moment.
I work in technology and have for close to the last 30 years so am quite comfortable diving into most technical tasks. As I get older I find I do not want to tinker as much so tend to appreciate things that “just work”. I’ll be retiring in about 3 years so I’ll need to either do some consulting work or teach to keep the old brain fresh.
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I’m quite enjoying reading these stories. Thanks all for sharing
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@mchnz Oh dear, my 65 year old mind is missing stuff… maybe I was still getting over the Wahine Disaster (April) and Inangahua Earthquake (May) in 1968…
So I saw it as described by @mchnz, apologies to all (please remove the likes.)…
Not being very old at the time, I did not know the TV coverage wasn’t the live event, I learnt of that much later. Here is 2019 coverage describing the delivery on the stuff nz news site.
Being from Wellington, the Wahine Disaster and the storm that caused it is quite indelibly lodged in my memory.
@mchnz likewise, I lived in Naenae… we got dismissed from school, still remember wading through water to get picked up. Then of course a trip to Seatoun to see the capsized ship…
Interesting.
Yes I was on the last year of a 3 year “sabbatical” from work in 1998, living in a cheap one room flat (with outdoor kitchen) on the beach in Phuket Thailand. I had a Compaq laptop computer, and in a computer shop (either in Bangkok, Hong Kong, or Singapore) I picked up a spare hard drive for the laptop (together with the custom Compaq frame for the drive compatible with the Compaq laptop). The Compaq model I had was a bit on the bulky side, but it was great for sliding hard drives in/out. With the power off, such a hard drive swap could be done in less than 10 seconds
So I pulled out my ancient (Windows-ME ?? ) hard drive, inserted the compaq hard drive and installed Red Hat off of either a CD or DVD (I can’t recall which). It took me 2 days before I was able to configure X so to load the desktop GUI. …
Part of what inspired me was my playing with computers going back to 1981/82 where in the military I ended up as a user on a Unix machine. As I user I would puzzle over the sort of bash shell type commanding, but i was given ‘cheat sheets’ to use to do commanding which I blindly followed.
Then in the 1988-to-1991 time frame, I was a user on a Vax VMS system which when not running from a GUI had its own particular interface that was very strange to me. Again I used ‘cheat sheets’ (prepared by someone else) to navigate the command lines.
So in the 1985 timeframe I purchased a CPM card to put in my Apple-IIe computer to play with the CPM operating system. But … even then in 1985, that Apple-IIe was slow compared to the competition.
At that time, a friend of mine who was very technical and into computers, was raving about some new operating system called GNU/Linux and how two people (Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallmann ) had joined with their projects to create an operating system for the IBM PC XT / AT …
I filed that knowledge away until my time in 1998 living on the beach in Phuket Thailand when I thought, “what the heck, as a user I have seen DOS, Unix, VMS, CPM, … lets try GNU/Linux on this old Compaq”. I picked up Red Hat installation media in Bangkok’s Pantip Plaza computer mall which was operating at that time. Red Hat was painful for me to configure initially, but I succeeded in the end, and I was pleased as punch.
In 1999 I ended in Germany, in Europe, working again (after the sebbatical) . My Compaq laptop had pretty much died by then (we used it as spare parts for my wife’s identical model of Compaq latop). So I was back to using Windows-me ? or another Windows version.
I was walking to work and stumbled across a another individual who worked at the same place. They knew an infinite amount more about computers than myself, and when I noted I once was a Red Hat user, and I was planning to buy a new computer and put GNU/Linux on it, he noted, given this was in Germany, why not try openSUSE (I think it was called SuSE in those days).
So I did, I ended up corresponding with many on two different SuSE forums (before they joined into one forum), and I enjoyed the community interactions and enjoyed those with whom I liaised with on computer aspects … and many years late here I am today at age-71.
Sadly, I feel I am out of date now, and I knew much more 15 years ago, than I know today.
Competition can degenerate into hard work. So I consistently avoided doing what other people did.
I applied for a scholarship from the Max Kade Foundation. The eagle had landed. Eleven days later, I started my traineeship at Carl Zeiss in Oberkochen.
After that, I began studying physics at the University of Stuttgart. John Argyris, who was a strong proponent of the finite element method, had just received a production version of the CDC 6600. Seymour Cray’s design was miles ahead of IBM’s then-leading model.
For the employees at the Physics Institute, the SCOPE operating system of the CDC 6600, was completely useless. The HP 2116 minicomputer however turned out to be quite useful. It was developed as a versatile instrument controller for HP’s growing family of programmable test and measurement products. It was readily adapted to automating solid state physics experiments. In the seventies HP switched from magnetic core to semiconductor memory. Their 21MX Model 2117F provided excellent connectivity. Its Real Time Executive was very flexible and could be easily adapted to the specific requirements of the physics experiments.
When switching from physics to engineering in 1980 I was back to CDC and their CYBER Model 176 NOS/BE machines. The first project was the implementation and maintenance of the real time computer software of Mülheim-Kärlich nuclear power station, constructed by Babcock Brown Boveri Reaktor GmbH.
Germany stopped commissioning new power plants and the focus of activities shifted to nuclear fuel services at Beznau, Doel and Ringhals sites. The CDC CYBERs were replaced by Apollo/Domain workstations and eventually by HP Series 700 models running HP-UX. As the employees were distributed over 6 sites ClearCase software configuration management was enhanced by introducing MultiSite, with the combination of both applications comprising a precursor of git.
Translated by DeepL:
“In January 1991, I bought my first PC. I was quite happy with it, because the i386 architecture, which had become affordable a few years after its introduction, showed the difference between a real computer and toys with Intel 80286 processors, which were often nothing but a source of frustration.”
More:
"January 1991
I buy my first PC from Escom:
- Processor: Intel 80386 33 MHz
- Memory: 4 MB RAM
- Hard disk: Conner CP3104, 104 MB
- Coprocessor: Cyrix 387DX-33
The computer works perfectly, but it’s only when I upgrade the coprocessor for a lot of money that it becomes fun to work with. After I gave it away, it was still in use until 2003."
More:
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Sorry, I can’t beat you, but there could be two other aspects of the question:
- Who was the youngest to start with using Linux?
- What version of Linux did you start with?
Personally I think my first Linux was the Slackware boot floppy that had a tiny Linux system (with TELNET, SSH and FTP) on a 1.4MB floppy disk. I’m very proud that I found that image in my personal collection, as I think it’s not available online any more.
The other think I remember was my first real installation on a 20MB partition (something around S.u.S.E. 4.x): It had X11, Emacs and gcc (but I think there was not enough room for TeX). The machine was a 386SX @ 16MHZ with 8MB RAM and s 387SX coprocessor.
When using Emacs in X11 and running gcc with optimizations RAM turned out to be too low…
And some statistics: “make depend” (to compile the Linux kernel) took about 45 minutes on that machine, and a kernel compilation ran ove rnight 
Somewhat like my initial self-built ownership:
- 386SX-16
- 4MB RAM
- 80MB Seagate SCSI
- 512MB RAM Trident 8900 GPU
Right away I realized 16 bit I/O was a mistake. I quickly managed to find a buyer for that motherboard and bought one with a 386DX-25 and 8MB RAM that I used until upgrading when the price of a Pentium 75 with PCI Intel motherboard came below $600, and I bought a PCI Trident 9440 and 16MB RAM to go with it. The Seagate only lasted until its warranty expired, when I bought a 200MB Maxtor SCSI. I think my only other hardware upgrade was to a Trident 9680 before trying Redhat 5.2 in 2000. Meanwhile I had been using DOS5 and DesqView, later DOS 6.2, until the year following Warp 4 introduction when I realized I was overdue to get Internet. I bought OS/2 2.0 when it was young and upgraded to 2.1, but didn’t spend much time with either until the upgrade to Warp 4. I didn’t spend much time with Redhat/Gnome, happy enough with Warp, but did try Mandrake 7.0/7.1 and KDE, Corel 1.0 with WordPerfect 8 and 1.1, Xandros, and Linspire before discovering SUSE 8.0 and free installation via its NET installer, which is what started me on the path to eventually transition from OS/2 to openSUSE and KDE as primary OS and DE somewhere in the 11.0 to 11.2 period, after having given up on SCSI for ATA around 9.0 or so.
I’m a desktop kind of a guy. I built my current main machine from assembled parts about 7 years ago. Thus far no major parts have failed but the time is coming. It was quite a “number cruncher” at the time. Now it’s middle of the road. I have an old laptop with linux and a tablet with linux but have no fun using them.
I built desktops with each of my 3 grandchildren for their learning experience. I couldn’t do that anymore as I have lost all dexterity and sensing in my hands and fingers. Can barely grab a screwdriver much less use a fine one.
Don’t want to buy ready-made when this one goes. Only solution I can think of is to try and get one of my grandkids to return the favor. Maybe I could do a school project and have the kids really do the work but supervise.
Any ideas? tom kosvic
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My history is not quite as exciting as yours! Apologize in advance for the relatively short replies as I am doing these on work breaks. I got my first PC in 1993 which was a Packard Bell DX2-66 486. That was my first foray into computing. Once I figured out I did not like Windows at all, which didn’t take long, I started using OS2 for a while, then discovered Linux in 1998. I bought a boxed edition of Mandrake Linux in my local military exchange and at that time the install was a “next”, “next” affair and quite easy. I still use Windows at work because I have no choice. Since I am a penetration tester by trade, I at least get to use Kali Linux a fair amount at work.
Used nearly every Linux distribution on Distrowatch since, with a 2 or 3 year hiatus on FreeBSD because I really fell in love with that OS. Did some time with Macs and liked them but got tired of the walled garden and my relatively new MacBook Pro died and I lost faith so back to Linux. The only Apple hardware I have now is my trusty iPhone 11 which I will eventually have to replace when it is EoL.
@tckosvic keep an eye out on eBay for a HP Z series Workstation or a Dell Precision Workstation to suit your requirements?
I have two Z440’s and a Precision 5820… The boot time (firmware) for the Dell is slow with it insisting on running a hardware check on everything, it has a broadcom tri-mode RAID controller plugged in to a couple of SATA disks, I need to get some SAS drives… Plus I want more cores, it was used as just a file server.
The Dell is more up to date hardware wise and a v4 CPU, plan going forward is to swap over to that at some point and just use this machine for virtual machines and building packages.
Strictly speaking, I don’t think we will ever know who the youngest person to start with using Linux was - possibly a child of a Google engineer who took a prototype Android smartphone home. I remember the first time I saw a three or four year old child playing with her mother’s Android smartphone on a train and realised that the touch screen was ideally suited to her tiny fingers and would open the way for much younger children to have smartphones than could have coped with the buttons on a ‘feature’ phone.
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On the topic of computers and satellites and us aging … I suspect my engineering background is part of the reason I have fun playing with openSUSE today at at the age of 71.
Going back in my history …
I was very fortunate to obtain work in space satellites. The Apollo program thou, was long before my time. I was only age-15 when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, stepping off from the Eagle Spacecraft to make that first step on to the lunar surface.
It was not until at age 26 that I landed my first two year job in satellites. At the start of that I took a ~2.5 month course in flight dynamics and by the end of it, I could derive the mathematics of satellite orbits from Maxwell’s equations. Don’t ask me to do that now. I have long since forgotten how.
The math thou, came in handy. Where I was working, my boss wanted myself and another engineer to investigate different satellite orbits. This was in 1980, and we had no access to a computer. I noted it would be not practical for me to plot a satellite orbit by just hand calculation in any reasonable period of time. I would take me over an hour just to hand calculate the lat/long of a single satellite ground point.
But the other engineer working with me (in 1980) was nothing less than a genius. He did not know the math, but he had an old Commodore calculator, that could do something like 75 or so programmable steps. So he asked me to show him the mathematics.
I derived and wrote down the formulas and together we reduced them to as simple as possible (ie to simplify we did NOT take into account earth/moon/sun perturbations). We then (with his knowledge of the programable calcuator) programmed the Commodore calculator to produce lat/long of satellite ground traces. 75 steps of math was inadequate, so we had do program for 1st 75 steps of math, have the calcultor crunch the math, to produce intermediate values, then load in another program in the calculator for another 75 steps of math, insert the intermediate values, have the calculator crunch the numbers (obtain the new intermediate values) and then load in the final ~65 steps or so (and load in the new set of intermediate values), and have the calculator crunch the numbers. That would produce a single lat/long point over which the satellite flew. We would then write the number down.
Buy using the above, within one day, we could produce one satellite ground trace. … Just one. Within a week we produced 5 satellite ground traces of different orbits. Our boss was pleased as punch and he showed it to others in our organisation (who had access to a computer where we were denied access). At first they didn’t believe our results, so they took the Kepleraian elements for the orbit, plugged it into their computer, and returned to our office less than an hour later, with the same results that took us a week.
They were amazed with what we could do with a calculator. I was amazed at how fast they could do it with a computer. That inspired me in March-1981 to buy my first computer, a used Apple-II-plus, with 48kB of RAM and 2x128kB floppy drives. It was a (relative) power house compared to the Commodore calculator.
But it was still too slow for satellite orbit mathematics !! So I bought a math co-processor card that would go into the Apple-II+, where that card supported the ‘forth’ computer language. I reprogrammed the satellite orbits in ‘forth’ and it was massively quicker in plotting satellite orbits with the Apple-II+ 6502 processor - albeit by today’s standards even with the Forth language and math-copressor card, it was slower than molasses in January.
I also programmed forth using that Apple-II+ math co-processor to draw maps of the earth’s coastline such that one could see the theoretical earth view from the satellite. To do that I had to create my own electronic map, which i painstakenly did by hand, writting down a massive lat/long list of points associated with the earth’s coast line.
With the two programs together, I could then see the theoretical view of the earth from the satellite as the satellite flew around the earth.
…
After that, my career took a turn and it was not until later in the late-1980s and early 1990s that I worked on an instrument for NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) and then later on the Canadian contribution to the International Space Station.
.
Corporate takeovers thou resulted in me being laid off work in 1995, so in 1996 I headed to Hong Kong, and then in 1997 to Thailand, where in Thailand, I finally got into using GNU/Linux.
I’ve also ‘coded’ (if one can call it that) automated procedures to use Spacecraft Test and Operations Language (STOL) on UARS, and Spacecraft Automated Procedure Execution (APEX) to work on European satellites. However I was never associated with the operating system then, I only worked as an engineer ensuring my subsystem on the satellites (optical instruments) worked well when commanded by the automated procedures.
Testing the procedures before use on the satellites was incredibly important, and I think I have that philosophy ingrained in me today … so today when I use output from AI Chat bots, I mostly always do my best to check and test what they output. When I use an AI Chat bot, i dare say 90-to-95% of the time is spent by me in testing and verifying the AI Chatbot’s output.
For me, getting older, I believe the advances in Artificial Intelligence will be a boon, increasing the utility and enjoyment of my final years.
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