| This story reminds me of a funny story of how I came to learn Unix and found my future career. In Fall 1993, I was a freshman at Vanderbilt and I was sitting in a computer lab, working on a CS assignment. There was an upperclassman guy sitting next to me, chatting on IRC. I'd never seen this before but I was intrigued. I was an avid BBSer and FidoNET sysop (LOL) and the idea of pan-Internet chat was fascinating. I asked him how I could use this program and he showed me how to launch the client on our school's VAX system. I was hooked and began to spend my weekday nights at the lab, chatting on IRC. A month or so later, I got a call from my father and he was pissed. He had gotten a bill from the school for $800 of "computer time". As it turns out, the school gave every student a small amount of CPU time on the CTRVAX system to register for classes and send e-mail. I was a VMS rookie and I wasn't aware that I had to exit the IRC program when I was finished. I'd just been closing the telnet session and that left IRC running, eating up CPU time. It was like a cell phone data plan: you had your quota and everything over that was very expensive. After I got the call from my dad, I went to the people who ran the VAX and begged them for mercy on this bill. They were merciful but suggested that I find another system to IRC from. They suggested the Sun Microsystems desktops in the CS lab. The Suns were great because there was always a wait to get an open PC in this busy lab but the Suns were unpopular and always available. I'd never used SunOS before but some guy in the lab helped me get started with it. These SPARCstations were very bare-bones. They had the Sun C compiler and of course OpenView but that's about it. I didn't know anything about compiling OSS back in 93 so I used a popular method to get a client installed. There was a server, sci.dixie.edu, that you would telnet to: % telnet sci.dixie.edu 1 | sh Yeah, I actually piped the output of a telnet session to sh(1). Unthinkable nowadays but this is how most of us got started. A few minutes of compiling later, I was up and running with a SunOS IRC client. Over time, I learned more about the Sun workstations and eventually because a Sun sysadmin. I was a steady IRCer (terrapen on EFnet) until around 2003 or so, when the juvenile politics and fighting got to be too much. |