💾 Archived View for gemini.mrdahl.no › linux_and_foss.gmi captured on 2024-08-31 at 11:49:36. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-08-24)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This summer (2021) I broke out of Microsoft Windows, and run! Finally! I'm not locked up, and I'll never look back.
...more of this later.
Here is my story, as I remember:
In 1995 I bought my first PC with Windows 3.11! When it was exteded with a printer, CD-ROM and soundcard I had all I need...
I soon started reading about computer/computing. I sucked in as much info I could gather. The sources were mainly magazines.
And a new version of Microsoft Windows was announced. Windows 95. Exited! I bought the Win95 bible, a book 5 cm thick. Brilliant reading.
After a while I read about this Internet where it was posible to exhange information with other in the whole world. Amazing! To be able to connect to the Internet I had to telnet into a telnet server through telephone land line via my modem to download a WinSocket-something. With that well installed I could call up the Inetprovider and connect to the Internet. Great. The only downside was that I had to dial a long distance call. Expensive. I came over a catalog over BBS servers one. And one of those were within local call. There was a discussion forum, among a few other things, which was syncronized with a network on the Internet once a day. Several interesting topics over there. I only had to download a client software (from Internet or telnet or BBS, don't remember), install that. Then I could call the server and download unread posts in the topics I subscribed to. And read and posted offline. Very pleassant. Offline == tranquillity!
The Internet was so fun to explore! I, one day came over info about a new service called Internet Relay Chat. It was a service where you could write messages witch was recived in an intance. How cool wasn't that! I had a party with a friend of mine there. A friend I knew in RL. We were cheering in beer (I was old enough) and shitchatting. Really great. BTW, this is a moment I must remember when I hear about kids having all their sosial activities online, and telling me it's a sosial life with great quality...
mIrc was a nice place to hang out.
Form yet another magazine i read about a new service where a server could return code wich was presented to a client. It was kind of documents that could containe text, images and links to other pages! They called it the World Wide Web. What possibilities that was! possibilities to present information, filling pages with distracting moving pictures, popups, making holes to invade and steal from you and spying on you and locking you into ecosystems you can't get out of. You belive you are a user of a product made for you, but in reality you (data about you) are the product. It's sad, it started so promising...
Nevertheless, back in the 90's I downloaded a WWW client. Mosaic, I belive it was the first web reader. I wrote in the addresse to a server in Minneapolis. And it started to show little by little of the page, sooo slooowly, looking nice. And the then the browser crashed. I had not enough RAM :-(
But IRC, FTP and mail is also cool.
While using the internet and reading magazines I became familiar with the terms of the free internet and the free software movement. And Linux offcourse which is a central pice in this. This is intriguing. I rather early install Linux on my PC and testing it out. I beleve there only was Open Suse and Redhat those days, what I was aware of.
I have reguarly tested out Linux in hope of dich MS Windows in favour of Linux. But there was always something missing so I had to go back to MS Windows. OpenOffice was really good back then but I was locked in by MS Office. In around 2002 I was working at a company developing software based on MS SQL Server. So I was trapped there. (But I have to admitt that SQL Server and Visual Studios is an exellent enviroment to work in. Cant the FOSS univers compite with that..? I hope so).
When you are stuck somewhere you eventuelly
193