Happy Birthday GNU!

19 Sep 2015

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GNU!

With apologies to those who feel differently, I will refer to Linux as Linux, not GNU/Linux.

My first exposure to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) was in highschool. My “boy meets Linux” story takes place in the mid-nineties when GNU was still (relatively) new and Hurd was still just around the corner. What makes my story unusual is that it is not one of love at first bash prompt. In 1995 or 1996 Valdosta Highschool purchased a new scoreboard for the football team . . .

Context Interruption: Yes, in South Georgia, even “boy meets Linux” stories revolve around football. South of the Mason-Dixon, you just can’t escape the religion of the pigskin.

. . . I was in class. Don’t remember which one. I do remember being called to the pricipal’s office over the intercom. I could not figure out what on earth I could have done to have earned me a conversation with the principal. I went to his office and he asked me to sit down. I just knew I was busted, for something. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it was bound to be bad.

He proceeded to tell me about the new scoreboard. I was . . . nonplussed. He told me they were looking for a geek student (his slip of the tongue) to run it during the weekly football gladiator games. I confesst - I didn’t see that one coming. I was slightly annoyed at being called a geek by the principal, it did sound like fun. Besides, I didn’t have anything else to do on my Friday nights. At this point in the story, it should be pretty obvious EVERYONE thought I was a geek. I suspect I was given this opportunity because none of the semi-literate footabll players, coaches or alumni could figure out how to make the board work. But that’s cool. Blinking lights! What could be more fun than blinking lights?

The school even let me help install it. First time playing with fiber-optic cables. I don’t really remember much about the hardware. It was top-end, but the only thing I was allowed to do with it was prep for the games and run the scoreboard. I wasn’t allowed to do much else with it. The software didn’t impress me. The interface was counter-intuitive and it took quite a bit of attention to run it. Another student, the coach’s younger son, sat next to me and told me what was going on down on the gladiator field and I would put something relevant onto the blinking lights. In those days, my candy of choice was Twizzlers. I don’t remember how it happened, but somebody gave me a hat to wear that looked like Dr. Seuss’s hat from “The Cat in the Hat”. The only difference was my hat was black and gold, the school colors.

Truth is - I had a lot of fun running that scoreboard. I enjoyed developing the animations and pictures. It was a riot leading the entire community in chants against the other team. The cheerleaders even took cues from my scoreboard! Victory For The Geek! The local daily ran a short story on the scoreboard and by extension, me. Sadly, the picture they ran hid my face behind the CRT screen. All you could see was the hat. Can’t remember if you could see the Twizzlers or not.

Did I fall in love with GNU or FOSS or Linux? No. It was just something I did during my senior year. Linux didn’t empower me, the scoreboard did. Blinking Lights == WIN.

I wouls later realize it was a simple REPL interface running on X-Windows. I think the language it used was proprietary. I’ve never seen anything like it since. I could write scripts which would trigger pre-designed routines. There was a text editor (not Emacs) to help me write display scripts. The main interface had a few buttons. It was a simple, Motif-based GUI (ugly). According to the manual it was running an OS called “Red Hat”. At the time, that struck me as a stupid name for an OS.

To the legions of faithful - I’m Sorry. I repent. On this day of GNU celebration, forgive me.

I know the scoreboard ran for several years after I left for college. Eventually, the city condemned the old football stadium (Death Valley). When the school built a new one, I know they dug up the 50 yard line and took it with them to the new stadium. I assume they left the screen (and my blinking lights!) behind.

The truth is - my introduction to Linux was forgettable. The GUI was ugly, it was hard to use and the OS had a silly name. Fortunately, it was attached to a blinking scoreboard that made me (a geek) cool for two hours every Friday night. I liked it, but the OS itself didn’t empower me and I quickly forgot about it when I went away to college at Georgia Tech.

During my first year or two in college, I ran Windows NT and BeOS. Loved me some BeOS. It was the remarkable little OS that flopped. I remember installing another version of Red Hat, but I didn’t think much of it compared to BeOS. It seemed crude.

During my third year in college, I bought a Compaq business laptop. It was an awesome laptop, but Windows ran like shit on it. I don’t know why, but this laptop could corrupt the Windows NT kernel in about two weeks. This was a problem because reinstalling Windows was a huge chore on this laptop.

In the interest of weight, my little Compaq had a detachable CD-ROM drive, which Windows could not use during installation because of a driver limitation. To install Windows, I had to take it back to the company I bought it from and they had to re-image the drive for me. This was a monstrous pain in the ass. After Windows died for the third or fourth time, they convinced me to install SuSE (running KDE) on it. Other customers were having the same problem and they assured me this SuSE thing would run better and be more fun to use. Unlike Windows, SuSE could use the CD-ROM during installation. I bought a copy of SuSE and they helped me install it. It worked. Well. SuSE ran like a champ on that little Compaq. I used SuSE the rest of that year. I learned about Star Office, KDE 2, DCOP, KMail, bash, etc. This time, I had lots of fun learning Linux. The breadth of applications that came on that stack of SuSE CDs blew BeOS out of the water. Compatibility with Microsoft Office was a little flakey. Some things never change. In 1996, Linux wasn’t interesting to me. Blinking lights (and cheerleaders) were. In 1999, Linux opened my eyes to a whole new world. It empowered me by giving me control of my computer and introducing me to a whole new world of software and tools. But more importantly, using SuSE introduced me to the Linux community because I had to get some help to make everything work perfectly and the SuSE community was, and is, a really cool group of people.

Was / Is Linux perfect? No. But, SuSE worked better on that Compaq laptop than Windows (booting is nice) and it left me in full control of the system. And the tools. OMG - EMACS! I could modify it. I could share my modifications with others. And they would use them! (Except for the ones that sucked, sorry about those.) And with that, I was smitten. The technology was cool but I got hooked on the community. Online, there are Windows forums, but there is a Linux community. Big difference. I never looked back. I have not owned a personal computer since 1999 that ran Windows for more than about 10 minutes. My wife uses Kubuntu 15.04. I run Fedora 22 on a Surface Pro. After all my silly hat comments, the story of how I came to use that same silly hat on my laptop is worth its own post. But, that is a story for another day and this is the end of my “boy meets Linux” tale.

It seems appropriate to end this post with the freedoms and philosphy that has given my so many opportunities (starting with the blinking lights)! I have been running Linux and GNU and lots of other Linux tools for over 15 years. Wow. I’ve got a lot of good memories back there. And, a lot of freedom.

• The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

I want to personally thank Donald Knuth, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds,Alan Cox, Guido van Rossum and all the other unnamed luminaries of the FOSS movement. Thank you. I have been able to build a career and livelihood out of these ideas. And, in the spirit of SuSE, I have had a lot of fun doing it.

THANK YOU GNU!