On August 25, 1991, Linux 0.01 was announced. All of us have a story to tell about Linux. I told my story a couple of months ago, but for those who weren't here: My first exposure to Linux was when my grassroots hospice organization moved from paper to digital charting. We didn't have the funding to get something proprietary, but the IT department had Linux set up on our old machine, and we used the GNOME desktop and OpenOffice to start our journey in creating digital assets.
I recently asked some Opensource.com authors this simple question:
What was your first Linux experience?
From VAX to Linux
For my junior year of high school, I was shipped off to a state-run "nerd farm" (that's the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics.) Our first day on campus, the juniors were each assigned a senior big brother or sister. My senior big sister ditched me because she had tickets to go to a big outdoor music festival with her boyfriend, but when they came back all sunburned, we hung out in my mostly empty dorm room eating takeout on the floor. That was when I first met Matt.
As the year wound on, Matt showed me how to help as a student sysadmin changing backup reels for the VAX mainframe and doing basic tasks on the "big" workstation that doubled as a campus-wide UNIX server. He had a PC in his room, with GNU and XWindows on a Minix kernel, but found this cool new alternative that some Finnish student had started posting