What Excites You?

[Tom Buskey]

I high school (1980) I had an account at Dartmouth College.  They had 
conferencing.  IRC and IM are similar.  I used to talk an hour a night.

When I was in college (1987) my roomate let me borrow his account to 
run rn to read net news on a Gould running unix.  I kept trying to use 
DOS to run vi, C, awk, gnuplot, LaTeX, emacs, shell, etc but it just 
didn't quite do it.  I tried minix, but that wasn't much better then 
the DOS utilities I had.  The DOS editors didn't have the 64k file 
limit either.

Around '92 I got a 486.  I tried OS/2 2.0.  I ended up running unix 
tools ported to OS/2.  Better then DOS because they didn't have the 
memory limits, but...

I tried BSD386 0.1 and it wouldn't boot.  Linux SLS w/ kernel 0.95pl5 
did.  I had LaTeX, real emacs, vi, awk, shell, and XFree86 2.x.  Now, I 
could run all the tools w/o the limits of DOS etc.  i don't think linux 
had networking at this point.  I certainly didn't.  Not even a SLIP 
connection.

I like Unix because you can combine and build tools to get the job 
done.  Linux brought it off the expensive computers to a box I could 
have at home.

At this time, I started sysadmin at a unix shop.  They used emacs and 
LaTeX for memos.  I could do that on Linux.  They had the Island suite 
for a few users.  And macintoshes running Office 4.2 w/ Word and Excel. 
  Pine for email.  mosaic was just coming out.  Windows was at 3.1.  NT 
at 3.1.

Today, I can build a better office environment for free w/ Linux, the 
GIMP, evolution, gnumeric, abiword, and OpenOffice.  It's so far ahead 
of what we had in 1993.

I can build an office server.  This summer I built a mailhub with imap 
and an imap to web server with SSL for security.  On a P200 someone 
gave me with downloaded RH 8.  All the packages were on the CDs.  I 
didn't have to chase different FTP sites to find the pieces.  The whole 
thing took about a day because I had never setup sendmail for incoming 
email before.  It serves my wife and I very well.  And it's faster then 
the old sparc 1s I used to admin.

That's what excites me about Linux.