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by markus_zhang 20 days ago
For a 13 years old? Wow that’s so amazing. How did you get him interested in Linux and OS stuffs in general? Btw you can probably get him access to the actual systems — there are people offering accounts for those operating systems.

I probably have another OS book that covers slightly different ones — instead of IBM mainframe OS it covers CP/M.
1 comments
skissane 20 days ago
> How did you get him interested in Linux and OS stuffs in general?

I’m sure I made some contribution, but a lot of it is just him-e.g. he’s an Arch Linux zealot, I never touched Arch until he started demanding I fix things he’d broken in it. I think he was converted to Arch by Youtube

> Btw you can probably get him access to the actual systems — there are people offering accounts for those operating systems.

I’ve run MVS under Hercules before, he doesn’t need anyone else, he can emulate and I can help him do it. (Except for OS/400, there is no emulator for that sadly, but I have a free IBM i account from pub400.com and he can get one too.) But he hasn’t decided he wants to yet

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markus_zhang 20 days ago
Thanks. How did he start? My 6 years old probably would love to play games or what not, but I don’t think he has the patience when he is a bit older.
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skissane 20 days ago
I bought him a desktop with Windows installed. At some point, he decided he wanted to install Linux. He wanted to try Arch, but got stuck on the install process, so I helped him install Ubuntu. Later on, he managed to solve his problem with Arch installation-so now his desktop triple-boots between Windows, Ubuntu and Arch, although he almost never boots into Windows any more. For his 13th birthday, we bought him a laptop that came with Ubuntu preinstalled. I forget when he became interested in Linux, probably around 11 or so? He’d already heard about it from me, but Youtube was also a big influence on him.

As a preschooler he already knew how to use DOS (technically DOSBox’s command prompt), because he was in love with Commander Keen mods

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markus_zhang 19 days ago
Thanks! Looks like he started very early! What kind of things did you allow him to do when he was a preschooler? I’d assume maybe 30 mins everyday, mainly about typing games and maybe a bit of BASIC? Did he show patience back then or did you grow his patience somehow?

Sorry about the train of questions…

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