Computers

Ever since I was a young child, I have been fascinated by computers. Sure, as a kid I liked games (still do, for that matter). I would pick about games in my head and try to figure out what the computer is doing.

When I was about 12, my dad got the family a Commodore 64. It was really amazing to me, and I did some minor stuff in basic. I wish there were a way to make sure things were permanent, like POKE 53280,0 and POKE 53281,0. The default text color had awful contrast with the blue screen. One of the many things I learned from the loadstar disks included with the computer when we got it. They actually had a ton of informative material, and the computer itself came with a nice manual.

A 1MHz processor seemed so fast back then, and a whole 64 kilobytes of RAM.

I learned about and played around with POKE and PEEK, but I didn’t have all the information to fully grasp what they did. I also played with BASIC. I wanted a real programming language in the worst way, but I didn’t think we could afford one. I wanted Pascal or C. I had saved my lawn-mowing money to a point, but had no clue where to find one at the time. I also wanted to buy programming books, but didn’t know where to get them or didn’t have the means to go to the library. Loadstar mentioned machine language and assembly at different times, and that was really intriguing to me. It still is to this day because you could directly control the processor. Modern CPUs are much more abstracted and, in general, more complex to understand. I still attempt to make sense of assembly language from time to time.

I’d read about modems and connecting to other computers over the phone lines. That sounded completely awesome to me, but we didn’t even have a working phone line in the house. I wanted to get on a BBS, thinking it would not only be fun to message people from all over, but would also contain all sorts of learning programs and texts you could download, as well as some fun games, from what I had read.

I did use it for doing homework and stuff, and it served that purpose well enough. Eventually, it stopped working. One day, the power supply got hot and stopped working. By that time, my mom was able to drive me to the library. I borrowed every book I could find in the computer section at least once.

After I graduated from high school, I started at the local community college and bought a PC from the guy who owned the pawnshop. The CPU was a 486 that went up to 66 MHz. It had 8 megabytes of RAM and an 800 megabyte hard drive (yes, you read that correctly, it’s megabytes.) It had Windows 3.1. Who remembers constant general protection faults?

I used the family’s phone line. Yeah, we finally had one! For most of my childhood, we did not have a working phone line. I used different dial-up providers to get online, constantly looking for shareware in programming languages or text files about computers, programming, or weather. I lurked on a few newsgroups related to those topics. It was mind-blowing to me to access information like that! Eventually, I wound up with my own phone line when the internet became unlimited instead of being rated hourly. I remember guessing the speed by the modem’s sounds.

With such a small hard drive, I was running low on space, so I may have misused deltree. Having bought the used computer, I did not have all the Windows disks. Fortunately, it was around the time Windows 95 came out, so I just upgraded to that. It took some getting used to, but that was better. Windows XP was the best. It’s been downhill for Windows since then. Luckily, I don’t have to use it that often. When I do, though, I really notice what a shitshow Windows has become.

In the late 90s, I learned about Linux, and I remember ordering disks to try it, but I was always afraid to use it. I didn’t have a backup hard drive or anything like that, but the whole idea of Linux intrigued me. Downloading even a diskette’s worth of stuff wasn’t feasible on dial-up. I didn’t have enough hard drive space to partition it, couldn’t afford a larger one, and didn’t have the vision to feel comfortable installing it.

A few years later, we were able to get cable internet here. We had it before it was even officially available, so they didn’t and couldn’t charge us or guarantee it would work for the first month or two. We’d build a new computer then. That was fun to do! AMD Athlon 2600! Over a gigahertz bitches! I played some computer games, but I never got too into it until the computer started crashing randomly.

I also installed a second hard drive and played with Ubuntu Linux for a bit, but something about it didn’t click with me. I’d always wanted to give Linux a try and switch to it, so there was no harm in giving it a shot. Not long after that, I tried FreeBSD. Well, DesktopBSD at the time, and there was no looking back. The way they separated the ports from the operating system itself just clicked with me and made sense. The consistency worked for me, and they’re man pages made more sense. Other people may and will have different preferences, but that’s the beauty of having multiple options! I quickly ignored the DesktopBSD aspect and used straight FreeBSD, installing the desktop options of my choice. That was FreeBSD 6.

Currently, I use CURRENT on my home computer and a stable version on my servers. I’ve never had anything break to the point that I HAD to reinstall, except the time I did rm -rf on a running system on a failing hard drive, just for fun. I’d already moved my stuff to a new drive that was ready to go.

Ideally, I can learn enough to contribute to the project. FreeBSD may not support the latest and greatest hardware. I do a bit of research, and the supported hardware works out of the box. At least in my experience, it has been rock stable, and I choose what I know will have drivers and such for it. Here are some useful FreeBSD command line tips.

I love old computers and would love to pick up some and play with them, but the space doesn’t really exist to do that. Should we ever win the lottery, I’m getting a space just for that! I would love to play with old 80s computers when computers were a new thing to have in the house. I want to check out the other ones that were out when the Commodore 64 was out. Since we had a C64, I never got to try them out.