I found the appended anecdote hilarious, and it brings up an issue which I've been considering for a couple of months: our age bracket came into Linux once we were already pretty familiar with computers. I started off with Apple IIe's and a 286 running DOS (yeah, I remember thinking MS-DOS 5.0 was a big step up). I didn't get into Linux until high school, after I'd already been using computers for about eight years.
We hear a lot about how younger and younger age brackets are more and more familiar with computers. Largely those are PC's running Windows. But what about those kids that grow up in a Linux-based household? I imagine that Byron and Annie's kids are going to be comfortable with "emerge kde" before they're even in kindergarten (congrats to you two by the way -- two weeks late is still better than never). Dave Smith's kids will probably be able to parse PHP just as soon as they can read. Sasha's kids probably already speak a mixture of English, Russian and SQL. And I'm terrified that mine will grow up thinking that Blender has a *good* user interface. I think part of the increase of Linux in commercial environments is that students who started using it in college are now taking it with them into the workplace. Are we going to have a generation -- or at least subset thereof -- of children who haven't ever used Windows, or for whom Linux is the "normal" operating system on a computer? What effect is that going to have on Linux's popularity? -- Soren Harward [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- Forwarded message from "Edwin C. Philips" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----- Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2003 21:11:52 -0600 From: "Edwin C. Philips" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [fslc] Re: FSF statement on SCO vs. IBM lawsuit To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Matthew Szulik's Keynote speech was very impressive. He didn't mention Red Hat or it's products once. Absolutely Zero sales pitch. I was very impressed by that. [...] He told a pretty cool story too. He was at an airport wearing a redhat shirt. He wound up in a conversation with some kid (9 or 10, he guessed) with a laptop, who asked him is he had seen RH9 yet. Matthew asked him if he used it in dual boot mode. The kid responded that he understood computers and didn't need to dual boot, but that his parents, who struggled a bit with understanding technology did use dual boot systems. "And a little child shall lead them..." ----- End forwarded message ----- ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
