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I have been playing with Linux since May 1995. I ran it on a 486DX33 with 32 MB of memory. At the time, sound didn't work and a few months later, I got SLIP dial-up to work. Almost all of my Internet was done on my P90 with Win 3.11 WFW. One nice thing about the Internet in 1995/1996, marketers have not had much of a chance to spoil it unlike today with pop-up and pop-under ads, corporate web sites that are a pain in the @$$ to navigate around especially trying to get technical information.

Today, I play with Linux on the x86 as well as SPARC and MacIntosh platforms. I also have played with FreeBSD, OpenBSD as well. Linux does much more for me today. I play DVD's on Ogle and Xine and this includes Region 2 DVD's (Japanese Anime) as well.

I was running Xenix on the TRS80 Mod 16A (68000) at my house in 1983. I used that platform to port David Korn's early version of the Korn shell. My only connectivity was UUCP with a dialup to UCSD as my edge of the network. It was suitable for e-mail connectivity. Phil Karn released his "net" code that permitted running TCP/IP on a DOS box in 1985. I ported it into Xenix and had a 9600 bps SLIP link between boxes in my office. Bill Simpson was still developing PPP protocol at that time. He was pressing Van Jacobson to finish his TCP header compression to make the PPP approach more palatable.

I had to drag my company (PacBell) in the TCP/IP direction. My room full of UNISYS 7000 systems were first linked with SLIP links at 19200 in a "star" configuration using the 36 port serial interface on one machine to create a big default destination and router. After demonstrating the economic benefit of the "cheap" implementation, the company authorized installation of Ethernet on all 80 machines (San Diego and Hayward). The savings continued to accrue and the pattern was set for continued deployment.