[TriLUG] Waxing Nostalgic

[brian mullan via TriLUG]

Wow, I loved reading this "*Waxing Nostalgic*" thread.  What Great Times
we've lived thu!

Warning... the following history will be really interesting to many but it
is... Long
So the TLDR folks might want to skip to the bottom now.
                                                               = = = = =
I started w/computers in college.  IMSAI 8080 (I can laugh now).  No
keyboard, no mouse but a bank of toggle switches on the front
to enter bytes of commands one by one literally took forever to even get
what today is a simple calculation.

Around the same time I was also learning Fortran w/Punch Cards.

I was young and a couple years later, working at Martin Marietta in Denver
I was programming using 8080 assembly language for
govt communications equipt that did encryption & more, in a whole *8-16MB
of ram *.. kills me now to think of it.

This was the dawn of a lot of things.   *Unix, DEC's Ultrix *(DEC's native
Unix for the PDP-11).

A co-worker was a great guy named Bob Burton who was an early genius with
Unix & DEC's Ultrix.
He was an extremely rare duck in even knowing Unix/Ultrix so well at the
time.
Bob taught me alot.

*In the late 1970s* three of us were lucky enough to be sponsored by the
govt to go to a
*Conference in Australia where two guys named *
*Dennis Ritchie & Brian Kernigan gave presentation/seminar about 2 topics
called "C" and "Unix" ??? *

I still have the simple 1 inch thick red cover loose bound book with
everything they discussed.
Even though I really didn't know much yet about an of that or who Dennis
Ritchie or Brian Kernnigan were *but I asked & got my "book" cover signed
by Dennis Ritchie.*

Forward a couple years and I was working with CPM then CPM-86. then later
Digital Research's Concurrent DOS (CDOS).

*CDOS was alot of fun*.  It was a multitasking, multiuser, real-time
priority driven scheduler 16Bit OS with alot of of "Unix-like" features
like inter-process communication (IPC) and
ran multitasking CPM86 software & many PCDOS (pre-msdos) applications.

It was around 1982 & the govt proj I worked on had me using CDOS on one of
the very first 16bit 8086 Laptop PCs from a California company
called *GRiD Computer Systems, Inc.*

It was during these years because of my previous experience with
Unix/Ultrix I heard about something called *Slackware Linux* and
it sounded "cool" and it could run my AT&T 8086 PC.

Using a 32kbps Modem I downloaded &* installed Slackware on maybe 12-14 5
1/4 in floppy disks.*
Boy, was installation fun ...

Anyway, all of that was part of another govt project *where I hit a "life"
fork-in-the road* when I was first introduced to and
had to learn to configure/troubleshoot something called an* AGS+ Router
from a company named "cisco systems" for national &*

*some intercontinental networks (not Internet).*

The AGS+ was a big box.  It supported IPX/SPX, DECNET, and the dreaded
Banyon Vines network protocols but no TCP/IP yet.

*Where I worked at the time, we were among the first to work with ARPANET.*

TCP/IP was developed in the 1970s and adopted as the protocol standard for
*ARPANET* (the predecessor to the Internet) in 1983
so it soon appeared in my world also.

*The Age of the future Internet was dawning!*

Some years passed & in *1994 I was working at Cisco Systems in Raleigh NC*.
Four floors of an Office Tower just off Capital Blvd & I-440.
All of 119 Employees (I was the 28th).   It was a *couple years later that
we broke ground on Cisco Bldg #1 on the new RTP Campus.*

These years were all about Networking for me.   TCP/IP, FDDI, SONET, RIP,
OSPF, ISIS etc

I met a lot of of really key people who invented the protocols for the
Intenret (like tony li for routing), Developed SW/HW for the Internet
in those years.   It was at first, only isolated networks for Enterprises
or Govt.    Soon after came the new "Public" Internet.

*Sometime around 1997-1998* I'd been *using Slackware* for a while and
learned about a *Magazine called LinuX Format (LXC) *that,
on subscription, was mailed each month on CD-ROM.

[TLDR restart here]

The point of this long long message was I just found perhaps 20 of those
LXF CD-Roms dating from around 2008...2013?.
The CD's contained the Articles and more importantly the installation files
for many early Linux Distro's that were popping up.

*Attached is a Scan of the CD Covers for just 6 of them that I thought many
of you would get a kick out of.   *
*Software like - Debian 6, old Fedora 12/13, Sabayon, etc etc*

If anyone might be interested in making a personal copy of any of these LXF
CDs, for purely educational purposes of course,
let me know.  CD to USB is easy enough to do.

Anyway, I hope some of you enjoy the pictures & geek memories attached.

Brian Mullan