I am a technical writer. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words about the Linux operating system over the years. I currently write for three different companies – one of them our beloved linux.com.
I thought I would introduce myself by way of discussing how I got involved with Linux in the beginning….
I came into computers rather late in life. I was just joining the professional world as a professor at a university and realized I had to have my first computer. So I bought an Acer Aspire with a 75 Mhz CPU. At the time it was sweet. I was on AOL and having a blast…that is until Windows 95 decided to do its thing and reveal to me my first “BOSD”. At that point I assumed it was a “feature” and plodded on. But that “feature” continued creeping into my daily computing life. No matter what I was doing I found myself having to reboot my machine with either the three or the one finger salute.¬†
After a few years of that I heard the whispers of another operating system – one that wouldn’t frustrate me beyond belief, one that would actually do what I wanted it to do. Being the curious monkey I am I had to know what this operating system was. That was circa 1998 and I finally heard the name Linux.
Being on dial up, the only way I was going to have this operating system was either: 1) from Cheapbytes or 2) from the local retail. I got lucky and the local retail shop had a copy of Caldera OpenLinux. Believe it or not I did get this installed. It was rough…like thermo-nuclear physics rough. I had never installed an operating system before and was, well, a bit taken aback by the process.¬†
Eventually it was installed and I was up and running. Only problem was I wasn’t doing much. It took me a while to finally figure out I was the proud owner of a winmodem, so I couldn’t get on line.
Ah the beauty of the US Robtics external dial up modem. It worked like a charm and I had Linux up and running and on line! I flipped the bird to Windows and never looked back.
Now I can say I have tried every distribution I can get my hands on. I have covered nearly every aspect of Linux one one or more sites. My writing about Linux has been published and translated into multiple languages.
Linux has been, and always shall be, my friend.
