A history of my computer usage

My brother Michael and I typed off BASIC source code for a card-game simulation and saved it onto an MC, from where we could read it in again. Every visit at our cousin Jürgen was a pure C64 session. When he came to visit us, we stuck to our TI-99 in the first time, but the next times he simply brought his C64 with him.

In 1988, when I entered grammar school, we had a computer science lesson in the first year. We used Commodore PCs and did around with Logo. I think they were pure MS-DOS machines. I remember a lesson in a DOS version of MS Excel. At home I did a bit more serious BASIC programming on an Epson HX-20, which I still own today, but isn’t working anymore. It had a low resolution monochrome LCD built in, but I connected it to a monochrome monitor with yellow illumination and brown background color. It had a tiny line printer built in, and—most exciting—a micro cassette drive. My cousin René taught me some BASIC things like how to use the random number generator. I coded games like a trivial space travel simulation (with ASCII graphics) and a text-mode nuclear war simulation (inspired by the film WarGames from 1983). However, this setup didn’t convince the average friendly C64 geek.

I still own my Epson HX-20

The reason that I received the Epson HX-20 from my stepdad was that he bought a PC. I remember playing the very Pac-Man on it, but the machine was a no-no for us in the first time. Later we were allowed to boot it for using the graphics software Dr. Halo or some games.

Everything changed in 1990 when both we and Jürgen got a Commodore Amiga 500 together with dozens of (absolutely unoriginal) floppy discs full of games. I think we’ll never forget when we stood at Jürgen overnight and played Amiga games, mostly It Came from the Desert until the early morning. It was fun to code a little in BASIC, as the interpreter knew a SAY command where a voice synthesizer could talk some English. But AFAIK I didn’t save anything on floppies. In 1993 I started to compose techno music with a MOD sequencer, and I remember creating an MC cover with DeluxePaint and printing it on a line printer. We kept this machine for several years, once in a while we dug it out for a session of Pang! or else, until 2005, when my parents trashed the fully functional box for no reason.

In 1992 we had another computer science lesson in our school where we did some programming in MS GW-BASIC. It was an easy game for me. We had fun to twiddle the line printer’s roller to produce wavy lines of source code on the paper. It was the time of Windows 3.11. Fellows had started to get own PCs (“286ers”, “386ers”) for christmas and asked around for games, just as it was in the C64 and Amiga 500 eras. I had to stick to my stepdad’s PC. Fellows brought game floppies to school and infected the school’s PCs with various viruses. I remember one of our teachers raging from class to class and asking wrathfully who had done it this time.

When the term internet came up, people talked about dialing in and calling up homepages. I had a diffuse imagination of how it is used: I thought that different websites had to be dialed by different phone numbers. I remember how my stepdad launched a program on Win3.11 called Trumpet Winsock to make the modem dial in. He showed us the Audi website in an early Netscape browser. We only had a few chances to discover the web under surveillance. I remember calling up the CERN website once. Using the internet didn’t take place without pressure of time, as it was charged by time, and the phone line was kept busy.

In 1995 I finally got my first own PC because I had my hair cut. It was our old 486er with a 50MHz CPU (switchable to 10MHz), 8MB RAM and a 500MB harddisk, IIRC. It ran MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 and was never connected to the internet. The successful extension by a SoundBlaster card was already exciting enough. I used the FastTracker II sequencer to compose electronic music. I taught myself programming C++ by a script I lent from a friend. I got a CD-ROM drive with quadruple speed for my 18th birthday, and my brother bought me an adventure game on CD-ROM. I wrote my articles for my school leaving examination with MS Word 7.0 (from MS Office 95)—my oldest files date back to that time.

Windows 95 was already released, and everyone was excited: Win95 was new, shiny and disputed. People were crazy about the first Intel Pentium processor—a friend of a friend bought one and was surprised that he obviously also needed a new mainboard. The sonic wall of 100MHz was broken through. A new era was coming up.

In 1996 I got over with my military service and started my scientific studies at university in October 1997. I had my first extended access to the web in our institute’s PC laboratories and opened an account at hotmail.com. I didn’t know anyone in my surroundings who also had an e-mail address, so I never used it. Nevertheless, I was soon receiving mails with various dubious offers although I never told anyone about my address. Anyway, every student was granted an own internet account after the first term, and for me that was in February 1998.

At that time I also got my second PC, actually my real first one, as I selected the components by myself (but had it assembled) and bought it by myself. It had an Intel Pentium MMX 233MHz CPU with 32MB RAM (in the first time), a 4.3GB Ultra-SCSI hard disk, a 20× SCSI CD-ROM drive and my first 3D graphics card with 4MB RAM. The mainboard had ISA and PCI slots, so I could keep the SoundBlaster card. Finally I had Win95 as well, and I transferred all files from my old PC to the new one by floppy discs. Later I got a PCI TV-card and watched TV on my 17" monitor.

On April 1st, 1998, I went to the PC laboratory with Oliver who helped me open my student’s account. The creation time of my ~/.profile is 12:37:36 (CET, UTC+1). I consider this as my birth date as a netizen. Now I had an e-mail address and 20MB webspace. I had to login via TELNET and read my mails with the text-mode client Pine. I think the accounts were on a FreeBSD machine, as an ASCII-art Beastie showed up at login. It was exciting to see that I really received replies to my mails to Oliver. I started to learn HTML to create my first homepage and uploaded the files with the WS_FTP LE client. The oldest mail I have saved is from May 1998, where I registered for the Cool Edit audio editing software. In July I got a license for the WinTeX 95 LaTeX editor. In September I bought a key for the WinPack archiver, and in October I registered for the 1-4-All HTML editor.

Oliver was also responsible for my first contact with Linux. He installed SuSE 5.2 on my PC parallel to Win95. He taught me some basics within a few hours, but that wasn’t enough for me to take advantage of that system. Somewhere at the beginning of 1999 I bought a SuSE 6.0 box, because it also contained an introductory book, and I replaced Oliver’s installation with the newer one. At that time I also got my first 56k modem, what finally enabled me to access the internet from my room in the dormitory. I had to share the phone line with my room neighbor. I used the Netscape Communicator suite for web and mail, and the mIRC IRC client to chat. But I didn’t manage to get the modem running under Linux. I tried to install a newer Netscape version for Linux by downloading it in Windows, but I didn’t have enough knowledge to perform the upgrade. And as I downloaded more and more things, I finally decided to remove Linux from my hard disk to make more space available.

During summer of that year I moved into an apartment where we connected our two PCs and two modems to the phone line alternately. I installed Win98 on my PC. At the end of that year we got cable TV and cable internet, and one PC got the cable modem. At the beginning of 2000 I bought two ethernet cards with BNC connectors and a long 10BASE2 cable to connect both PCs—I created my first LAN. By using the WinGate proxy software both PCs finally gained a high-speed internet connection (of 300kbit/s down and 64k up). During that time I launched a website for our baseball club that consisted of pure HTML, JavaScript and an external forum. I used the Napster client to download my first MP3s. I bought a new 3D PCI graphics card with 16MB RAM to get better gaming performance.

In spring 2001 I started to use SSIs in my HTML files and installed a Perl/CGI script to send mails via a web form. This made me familiar with the UNIX shell and the Pico editor, as I didn’t want to upload every single change via FTP. This and two courses in the winter term paved the way for me to seriously try to switch to Linux: I attended a PHP/MySQL programming course and a Linux course that even continued in the summer term. In October I got the brand new SuSE 7.3 box. When I got my third PC in November (AMD Athlon XP 1700+ 1.47GHz CPU, 512MB DDR SDRAM, 80GB UATA/100 hard disk, 16× DVD/CD-ROM drive, 3D AGP graphics card with 64MB RAM, all assembled by myself), my old PC became the internet proxy in our LAN. I was so proud when I managed to replace its old routing software with Linux. I named the machine ‘daemon’, it was soon running 24/7 in the corner of my living room and became my exercising platform for those two courses. I set up Apache and started to create PHP/MySQL components that I integrated into our baseball club’s website. I ran my own Linux web server! And I had also performed the migration on my new PC’s desktop:

12/2001: Linux Migration successful

At the beginning of 2002 I registered my first domain which pointed to that machine. I received mails via Postfix and IMAP, and I hosted our club’s website. I still have my Webalizer statistics from that time. My Linux knowledge grew explodingly. I attended programming courses to learn Java, C, C++ and Perl. I created a new version of the website using lots of PHP/MySQL and CSS. I hosted a YapBB forum. I attended a course off university to receive the CCNA certification. At the end of that year I replaced the SuSE firewall by a customized Netfilter script—it’s pretty much the same as I use today.

At the beginning of 2003 I replaced SuSE 7.3 by Debian 3.0 (’woody’) on my PC and on ‘daemon’, which was put on Software-RAID-1 at the same time. I wasn’t happy with Debian on my desktop, as the packages were rather old, so I bootstrapped a Gentoo system on it. My first domain ran out, and as I wasn’t happy with the top level domain ‘.to’, I decided to register my current domain. I set up the webmail application SquirrelMail. I bought a second (used) PC to set up a dedicated firewall machine, but as ‘daemon’ was on my first PC from 1998 that soon began to die, it went to the “new” machine. I got a full-time job as Linux sysadmin, network technician and web developer. I started to use SpamAssassin via the amavisd-new mail filter. I migrated MySQL from 3.23 to 4.0. My desktop PC went on Software-RAID-1 as well. I registered a domain for some fellows and me to set up a Mailman mailing list.

In 2004 I switched from Kernel 2.4 to 2.6 and pretty much settled to the current setup, but my knowledge still grew. I started to code in Lotus Notes at my employer. The rest of the story can be read in this very blog. Today my desktop PC is just a backup host, standing right below ‘daemon’ in our storage room. The hosting was migrated to a professional virtual server. Doris’ Toshiba notebook is our only desktop machine.

And the future? I’m currently searching for a new occupational challenge, probably in research & development in the area of signal processing, probably in software development. I wish I had more experience with Java, my knowledge is limited to a one-year course plus some Java/CORBA programs using Lotus Notes classes. And I wished I had even more experience with C++, as this language is closer to scientific purposes. I think about attending a professional C++ course. But we’ll see to what extent I can gain more experience at my next employer.