I turned down a professorship position at a uni in part because they used windows for the whole curriculum. It would have driven me crazy having to use windows given how annoying it is for dev work. I put value on my sanity and it wasn’t worth the modest pay bump to be driven batty every day.
I likely get to teach an IoT class next term. It’s going to be so much fun with SBC systems running Linux and Arduino sensor systems! That’s worth a ton to me.
What a wonderful world that would be. Fingers crossed.
They did that to my daughter. I’d setup a laptop for her. The windows boot partition was still there (my bad for scraping every last bit of Windows off - it was setup in haste) and she accidentally chose windows from grub one day. The Windows Bootloader decided to change boot options in the bios and then remove grub somehow, but there was no windows on disk to launch so it was bricked.
The next time I could out hands on the computer I scoured that disk clean of Microsoft’s plague rats so they wouldn’t get a finger in edgewise again.
At one point my 1GB disk was the “big one” in the dorm. It was the windows share of some random media. I had room for the whole 40MB videos “Jesus vs Frosty” (The Spirit of Christmas) and “Jesus vs Santa Claus”. It was before South Park became an actual show, but people watched those 100’s of times off my hard drive.
When I bought a 3GB from Fry’s it was an open question how we’d fill it. Of course, that was just as the mp3 codec started to gain traction… Problem solved.
I have it on the shelf, but haven’t gotten to it. I’ll put it in the reading queue.
There was also a competition (long ago) to see who could build a computer that would successfully boot Windows 95. The goal was to boot the slowest possible time (no arbitrary delays allowed).
The winner wrote a shim that emulated a floating point unit of the i486 so it would boot on a i386 (no floating point). The result was… booting after many weeks. They won big time.
I did some similar stuff on a Raspberry Pi. I had to NFS mount my desktop and make a swapdisk on the NFS mount to have enough RAM to build. It wasn’t fast, but it did eventually work.
We used a RPi 4 for a Plex server for a while. It was fine except it couldn’t do any live transcoding or handle h265 worth beans.
I upgraded to an OrangePi 5. I’m on a sata drive for the OS and a external USB disk for media. The thing is amazing!
No, it’s not a $50 computer. Yes, it works great.
I love RPi boards, but their hardware limitations are quick to be found as you move past simple hobbyist projects.
I use Intel NUC boards for desktop systems. The form factor is nice and compact. The only limiting factor would be the volume limits the GPU, but that’s not a requirement for me.
Do you remember the article about some university that accidentally walled in a Network server? It ran for years until they needed to put hands on it for something. They had to do the “follow the Ethernet cable” game until it went through the sheetrock into a dead space.
The Register still has the article from 2001: https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/
VAX/VMS was such a beast! The hardware wasn’t readily available to the public, though.
Oh, the wireless chipsets in the 90’s into about 2005? or so…that was a bad time for anyone trying to run wireless. Hell, MS Windows didn’t even have network drivers baked in until what, WinXP? Wiring computer together in the 90’s was such a a trial, both for hardware and software fronts.
I was lucky to score a 3Com 3c905b fast 10/100 Ethernet card from a bussy in 1996. That was well supported across the board (Linux and Windows), and the IRQ settings for the PCI bus memory mapped I/O and IRQs was well documented.
Edit: buddy, not a hussy, though he kinda was… Your call in how you want to read it.
I’m a Cryptonomicon person. The modern timeline is dated now, but the overall information warfare themes are delicious.
I was there Gandalf…
In comparison to the alternatives we had at the time, Linux was a fucking tank. Once it was up, you could expect to get 6 months to years of uptime unless you were installing new tools or changing hardware (no real USB/SATA yet, so hardware was a reboot situation).
If you got a Win98 machine up, it would eventually just hang. Yes, some could got a whole, but if you used it for general use it would crash the kernel out eventually. Same for MacOS (the OG MacOS).
The only real completion for stability was other UNIX systems, and few of those were available to the general public at a reasonable price point.
Way back in the day we’d download Britney Spears and My Little Pony™ distros. Times change, I guess.
There was some way to either steal a “dirty” magazine, buy one from an older teenager, or check out the one you found at your friend’s house that his dad had in a drawer somewhere.
If all else failed, there was always the Sears catalog.
Pitching your desire to block pornography against the collective sex drives of the whole populace is a recipe for you losing and look stupid doing it.
I ran Storm Linux for a short while in about… 2001-2002. Got it on a CD in a misc pack of disks from some Linux distro vendor.
It was supposed to be a server oriented distro, secured more than others, and ran Enlightenment for a desktop. Overall, it was a reasonable distro, but didn’t gain enough general support and devs to keep it up and running. The group behind it folded after a short while.
The hiding of the control panel is just extra pain for the fun of it. I know it’s the same tool they’ve had for many generations now so they’re hiding it because it’s ugly, but it’s the real way to get things done. Hiding it is just making everyone’s life harder, which is basically the Microsoft approach to OS design.
I had a Pentium I 120 MHz Packard Hell machine. It came with Win95 OSR 1 and I loved that beast. I upgraded the disk (1.1 GB to 3.1GB!) and the RAM up to 40MB. The screen was a 13" fishbowl so I get a Sony Trinitron 15" screen eventually.
The combo modem/fax/sound ISA card wasn’t worth keeping, but I got a PCI Sound blaster as well as a 3Com 3c905 fast 10/100 Ethernet card. I had one of the best machines in the dorm for a while. Warcraft II played so very good.
The Linux support in RedHat 5.2, then through 6.2, and sometimes Mandrake, OpenBSD, and some other distros was great. As long as you set the IRQs in the bios right it worked like a dream.