10 years of linux

Somewhere around 10 years ago, a new kid transferred to my school and we became friends. J was was precocious, running an ISP out of his bedroom of his parents' house, and he was into weird drugs and electronic music, and I, naturally, looked up to him. To my surprise, his desktop machine ran everything in old-style DOS text mode, with one app per virtual screen -- Linux!

I remember the next few years only vaguely: fighting with getting my modems to work, learning how to join J's IRC channels with my own computer running Linux, getting into and out of various scenes. In my freshman year of college I gave up Windows completely* and started using Linux as my primary desktop. I haven't looked back since.

I have a fond memory of sitting around at J's house with friends listening to Future Sound of London, and every time I hear certain songs I strongly remember that time.

Thanks, J.

* The main thing keeping me using Windows was Internet Explorer -- check out brad's cute gnomie hack, which I wrote a native Win32 server for at one point...