I’m a typical kid of the 80s who grew up in a world of PCs, Apple IIs and Commodore C64s. My dad was an IBM System 38 and AS/400 guy, so you’d better believe we had a genuine IBM PC at home (later supplanted by a PS/2 Model 70 with Micro Channel expansion cards, a 120 MB harddrive and a 80 MB tape drive which was clearly the envy of all my friends for about a year until reality dictated that installing a soundcard in this thing was going to be REALLY expensive compared to ISA soundcards).
I worked in DOS from day 1 because there was nothing GUI on a PC back then. I knew how to boot the computer and then type “mode co80” to make it switch over to the CGA monitor; yes, dual monitors on a IBM PC, you just couldn’t use both of them at the same time. But I did much more than just game on these computers playing PC-MAN, Battlezone and, the family gathering favorite among me and my cousins – Microsoft’s Decathalon; I had my entire baseball collection entered into Lotus 1-2-3, I tinkered with some BASIC programming and I typed papers for school into the word processor Final Word which was actually written and sold by Mark of the Unicorn which is known now only for their music software and audio and MIDI interfaces for musicians and recording engineers.
Suffice it to say that between Apple IIs at my cousins’ house and at kid college summer classes, C64s in the school computer lab and a DOS background I was well prepped to work as a computer labbie in college. (A computer labbie was the usually nerdy student worker who helped all the football jocks and blonde cheerleaders understand what a mouse was and explain to the hippie students decked in tie-dye T-shirts with dreadlocks on their heads and Birkenstocks on their feet that throwing their 3.5″ floppy disk into their backpack with the metal guard door bent way back was not a good way to guarantee gnarly results when you tried to print your philosophy paper 5 minutes before class started). But despite the Windows and Mac OS tech support, the real treasure was in what were considered the Computer Science Department systems on campus. In college at that time only the UNIX and VMS computers where connected to the Internet and not the Novell network with Windows 3.1 and Mac OS computers which limped along on 10BASE2 and IPX/SPX and AppleTalk. I still remember what my first e-mail address was and the war between Pine and Elm e-mail client users was as passionate as Android vs. iOS is today. This was why DOS was so important for me since I already knew the command line from very early on and picking things up in UNIX wasn’t too different (especially once you started adding a bunch of shell aliases so that typing “dir” resulting in the “ls -l” command, for example.
After college I got to use some Sun Sparc workstations and life was good. My UNIX knowledge from school was handy and I inherited a bunch of shell and awk scripts that the previous guy had written which forced me to learn an awful lot about shell code and awk programming real fast. After that came another job with IRIX everywhere from the desktop to the servers to the firewalls. IRIX was certainly different than Solaris which had been on those Sun workstations but I figured out the quirks eventually. We eventually began ditching the IRIX workstations (SGI O2s and Octanes) for Linux workstations and finally my home playing around with Linux began to pay off in the corporate world. (I once had Windows 95, Linux, Windows NT 4.0, OS/2 and BeOS all quintuple booting on my Aptiva at home). But then a new job came along and I didn’t touch Linux for a while. I worked as a consultant at a company with HP-UX. HP-UX was so quirky it made IRIX look normal by comparison. Never mastered HP-UX to be honest since I was mostly touching Solaris day in and day out at that job with only occasional HP-UX support needed when the engineers hollered. I learned a lot about making UNIX run in a Fortune 250 company there. Well after a bunch more Solaris on the desktop and servers Linux started making a comeback in my life, first on the desktop and then finally at a server level and things have pretty much been Linux ever since. Mostly Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on servers and everything from Ubuntu, Kubuntu, SuSE, Fedora, CentOS, Gentoo and Yellow Dog on the desktop.
So that’s my history with computers. Only other note is that somewhere along the way in about 2004 to 2006 Windows started becoming less cool and Macs running OS X became more cool. (Or maybe it was just that Vista was so bad). Before that, Macs were the enemy and Windows the good guys. (At one job in 1999 we named the Macs after Decepticons and the Windows machines after Autobots). Windows had become the top OS after IBM gave up on OS/2 (just like they had given up on that PS/2 mentioned earlier) and ceded victory to Microsoft on the PC desktop. Macs had a crummy OS in MacOS and the switch from Power Mac G3 to the Blue & White G3 was terrible with new machines locking up while just trying to install the OS making the Apple hardware a real bummer in addition to the OS. Before that, things where not much better with the NuBus Macs being Apple’s equally bad-as-Micro-Channel interface card standard. And the OS X Beta OSes seemed decent but you couldn’t do anything with them yet so before Vista came out, Windows was it. It seems very opposite today with more Apple than Microsoft computers in the house now. Don’t get me wrong, Apple has been in use by me for a long time but to be perfectly honest, it’s really only been tops the past 10 odd years when it actually became a decent experience. Still use both Windows (only 7, not 8!) and OS X just about everyday now (and Linux).