My history with Unix

I started to know the existence of Unix when I was watching Jurasic Park, when Lex Murphy (played by Adriana Richards), the granddaughter of John Hammond (played by Richard Attenborough) said, “This is Unix! I know this!”, or something like that. It got me interested to know more about it. Of course I didn’t get the chance to really use it; manage to briefly use it during my Uni years, accessing Fortran 77 at FKKSM (Fakulti KejuruteraanKomputer & Sumber Maklumat ). It’s the programming language that we engineering student must learn to use.

Then I came to know about Linux. They say, back then, it was the lighter version of Unix, and it runs on older machine. Never get the chance to really get my hands dirty with it though. I do manage to witness a few amazing thing with Linux, one of which a server running on a diskette, only a diskette. This is around the time where making websites, knowing HTML is the in thing. And yes I manage to make a few websites. This is also the era where Internet Relay Chat where every Malaysian would glorified themselves when they manage to so call “attack” mIRC users. I was on Pirch so I was not affected but it amused me. I got a taste of using just a fraction of Linux command at that time also because an acquaintance of mine introduced me to Eggdrop, a channel Bot that monitor channel activity, and it run on Linux. He’s the owner of Mesra.net, the hosting I’m on right now. Even though I never had the chance to really use Linux, I keep it to myself that one day I will use it. One day.

It took me about 8 years to have Linux running independent in my home. Because I don’t have any spare machine to actually have it running, so when I got hold of a new machine, I instantly change my old one into Linux. It was Mandriva distro at first before I change to Ubuntu. I’m still learning to use the command line and everything, but because I have the basic before hand, using it is also easy for me.

Still it doesn’t tell the Unix part is it? Well, when I started to use Mac, it’s only natural for me to click on everything, which include using the Terminal. The terminal for Mac & Linux is equivalent to Command prompt on Windows. You know the windows with black (or sometime white depending user preference) background consist of only text that you’d rarely use except when a computer technician/geek/friend use it to do something that makes you think he/she is a computer hacker because they typing fast on the keyboard without even looking at it. You know that? Yeah, that’s the one. The one on Mac pretty much look the same with what I saw on Linux. Geek friend of mine pointed out Mac is a descendant of Unix, so I did my little search and what do you know, I’m actually, in a way using Unix. So there you go. Even though it took me 17 years to actually, in a weird way, using Unix, at least I’m now part of it, even though just a fraction of it.

New mission? Trying to get hold of pre-loved machine and tried to fire it up using any OS out there. I’m thinking of Haiku, an OS inspired by BeOS, which according to my friend resemble Mac System 6. It worth the try because the percentage of having music and video application is greater than Mac OS X, Linux or Windows. So they say. A project worth trying, especially to independent music and video producer.

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