There is a question/thread over at slashdot titled What did you first do with Linux? Rather than copy my reply here, I’ll just put a link to my reply to that subject. I did have (and I mentioned it in the post) a get off my lawn moment when writing it. A fun walk down memory lane, and reading the rest of the comments on slashdot shows you how relatively early I was to the game.
It also makes me want to link to Anne’s idea of the best to learn Linux.
In 1998, Keith and some other consultants at a midwestern healthcare insurance software company would be overheard talking about this “Linux” thing. At the time I, old hand at SunOS and HPUX and IRIX, was increasingly frustrated by shortcomings of “Windows”. After several years of forced-by-corporate-mandate use at two jobs it found to be not an operating system at all, but merely a kludgey program-loader and some half-useful utilities. Somewhere along the way I gleaned from conversations of Keith and his consultant cohorts that this “Linux” thing actually transformed a PC into a Unix workstation, and the light bulb went on in my head that “I really need some of that.” So one day I blew away the company’s required windows and laid down the Redhat 5.1 I”ve been using GNU/Linux ever since.