I still remember the old times before xorg.confs were modular. The truly hard times.

Remember when /bin/sh was the default shell, when you had to build from source, grep wasn’t a native package.

We made fire from a friction drill. Knapped our own blades from flint.

Simpler times.

… I don’t remember building grep, nor do I remember a time before bash.

Are… Are you God?

I was there when the dark magic was written.

Genuinely curious. When was your first time touching Linux/GNU?

'94 but I was on Usenet when I heard about it first. That would’ve been around '93. Me and a buddy were pretty nerdy and his dad worked at Bell Labs and they got a couple floppies. That was my start. It was just the kernel and Gnu Utilities. Literally Linux+Gnu. Shortly after that I grabbed SLS Linux, that became Slack. Then Debian, I was in the listserve when Ian would still answer questions and fix bugs. I hope he’s found the peace now he was searching for in life.

I’ve contributed to quite a few open source projects over the years, nothing foundational. I didn’t really know anybody from the old old days. Just a geeky kid lucky enough to have a computer and a modem at the time. I am very privileged to have grown up when I did and where I did.

I don’t envy the kids coming up now. Completely abstracted away from their systems to the point where they actually think it’s magic. I had a very junior engineer ask me how to print a pdf the other week at work. I can’t imagine how modern education and tech have failed them. I hope I’m wrong but it feels like LLMs are talking away curiosity and hacking. I’m sure that’s just me being a crusty old bastard though.

I’m close, 93 also I think, slack on a 386.

Got stuck in vi, had to reboot.

Remember thinking how awesome 6 virtual consoles were. I think my tmux addiction came from there.

Lol! I thought vi was generally a new layer of the OS, like a sun terminal. Ended up creating 10 files containing exit, or quit, or ^c, until I hit the escape key and the cursor changed…then I rebooted from frustration and actually read the man page.

Rage quitting vi/vim really is a right of passage.

Remember ed?