On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 7:31 PM, Brandon Allbery <[email protected]> wrote:
> (I question Tom Limoncelli's claim about 1991 still being expensive, as that > was around when Linux first sprang onto the scene and even before Linux > there were some PC-based resources such as Minix which could be had for the > cost of a college textbook. Before 1990 was certainly a problem; my entry > was a decade earlier and would not have happened had a local not gotten the > idea of buying a TRS-80 Model 16 and then putting a couple modems on it for > people to play around with it when he wasn't using it.) Brandon, Yeah, I think Tom has correctly pointed out one of the inflection points in our community. 1991 was about the time that things 'started to get interesting' if you were a kid like me; in about a 24 month period, there, I went from having a 286 and a modem, playing AD&D gold box games and writing weird juvenile BBS messages (some would say that I never outgrew this.. heh), to having managed to acquire a 486-50 and figuring out how to do an early Linux install. [Thanks to a generous relative who could afford to put a then-$2200 machine in my hands... because they had correctly identified that carrying around the latest month's copy of Computer Shopper for a year or so was not normal. ;-) My life has never been the same.] I noticed similar levels of change happening around 1997, when the web sort of infected everything, and in the middle part of the 2000s when Ubuntu really seemed to take off.... even with friends in weird places like medical school or political science. Things are way better, now, for folks like Nonny -- a lot of barriers have been dropped, and you can run Linux on a $200 Chromebook, or castoff gear acquired from Craigslist and cobbled together, or whatever. It's now largely a knowledge-and-experience game, where the playing field is significantly more level than it used to be, and we can say "go forth and invent cool things" without it sounding like a tease rather than a dare. :) --e _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
