I have been using linux for about 20 years now...

I first found out about this strange computer operating system in in 1995 when a friend of mine who was even more geeky than I am showed me proudly that he ran Linux on his computers. He even showed me proudly how he had written a printer driver for his epson dot matrix printer for linux.

At the time, I was full blown supporter of Microsoft Windows 3.11 and NT because of the cool graphical environment that I enjoyed much better than DOS. At the time my friend did most of his computer stuff from the terminal or command prompt which did not impress me.

I got a job working in South Dakota for the cow company (Gateway 2000) providing technical support for their customers. I learned a lot about computers and the windows operating system. I was first trained to support Windows 3.1 and later Windows 95 which was radical switch at that time in the user experience.

Over the years, Windows 98 came out and then I started supporting Windows 2000. I continued learning new things but listening to people complaining constantly about window's blue screens and crashing started to wear me down. I got to the point where I could almost walk a customer through a complete system format and reload in my sleep.

In fact it got to be so routine for me that often I would start day dreaming while the customer and I were waiting on the computer that I would completely forget what we had done last and I would have to think up questions to ask to clue me in on what step we were at.

Gateway had gotten so big at that point and like all huge corporations, they began to cut corners with customer support in order to please their stock holders by squeezing out as much profit as they could. I finally decided to call it quits and went to work for the Internet division of a Cable TV company. While there, I was reintroduced to Linux as the operating system that ran on most of their servers. Although, I was still doing technical support for their Internet customers who mostly used M$ Windows, I began to take more of an interest in Linux because it was much more stable than Windows. Many of their linux servers had been up and running for several years which blew me away.

I decided I need to start learning about this operating system that years earlier I had scoffed at. I started looking and ran across Corel Linux. This short lived distro was developed by the same company that made Corel Draw - the popular graphic software whose colorful ads in the Computer Shopper were always several pages long. Anyway, I chose to try Corel Linux because it cam on one cd and included X windows (graphical user environment) by default without needing any setup.

I stumbled around the learning a little bit but became enthusiastic about my limited success using this new operating system. I decided to take a Unix class at the local technical college where I learned about command line (cli) tools like vi, sed, awk, grep and some regular expressions. The class touched briefly on each of these tools which didn't really give me very good working knowledge of them but it did awe me with how powerful they could be in my hands if I took the time to learn them.

I also liked the freedom that this operating system gave me. I could change almost everything I wanted to suit my taste as long as I was willing to spend the time learning it.

Corel Linux did not hold my attention for very long before I saw and purchased a copy of Mandrake Linux at Best Buy. This distro seemed to be more stable than Corel Linux but it wasn't long before I switched and learned about this new distro called Ubuntu 3.04. After installing this beauty, I was off to the races. I actually started using Linux more and more.

I started looking for open source software to replace the paid for versions I had been using in Windows XP. As I learned more, I started to wonder why more people were not flocking to these other choices that cost less.

After working at several other jobs, I got another job working for the Internet division for a small private phone company where I finally got start working on linux servers professionally for their customers, implementing open source backup solutions running on linux servers. I was in heaven.

I will save more of this story for the next post where I will describe my introduction into programming and some even earlier exposure to computers than this post mentions.