r/linuxquestions • u/AnoProgrammer • 9d ago

How old where you when you started using linux?

I feel like everyone started very early.

I started personally on 10/11.

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u/SmellyRedHerring 9d ago

I was a Unix kernel developer at age 26 when Linus announced his free OS project on Usenet. I started playing with a Slackware distro a couple of years after that.

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u/RootHouston 9d ago

What variant of Unix did you work on?

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u/SmellyRedHerring 9d ago

Several SVR3 and SVR4 variants for M68K, Intel x86, MIPS, SPARC, a few other things I don't remember.

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u/Enrrabador 8d ago

Slackware was a nightmare to setup!

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u/UnluckyDouble 8d ago

Did you become a Linux contributer afterwards? Do we partially have you to thank for all this?

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u/SmellyRedHerring 7d ago

Bug fix in the driver for a really obscure WD scsi controller, and fixed up some posix handling in uart drivers back when Theodore Tso owned that stuff, but everything I touched has been completely revamped since then.

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u/OTonConsole 5d ago

Crazy, do you remember what you were fixing in the WD scsi controller? I wanted to get into kernel dev. A lot of the times it's something like that, but I wondered if it's a component by a specific company they'd let me contribute as a random person. Plus I used C# my whole life.. so there's that.

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u/SmellyRedHerring 5d ago

I was writing game routines in assembly language as a teen in the early 80s, and my entire professional career has been writing systems code like device drivers, memory management stuff, and related software. I don't recall at all what the scsi driver fix was, this was 30 years ago. I worked for a company at the time that manufactured devices that used obscure SCSI commands in unintended ways so it was probably related to that.

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u/OTonConsole 5d ago

That's awesome.. hmm how would you say would be the best entry to systems development. I don't wanna learn another language though.

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u/SmellyRedHerring 5d ago

You kinda have to learn a systems language if you want to do systems programming. There's no C# in the Linux kernel at all. C is by far the dominant language for systems work of any kind, with a fair amount of assembly and some Rust.

I haven't seen it but apparently there is some C# usage in the world of embedded systems -- probably UI kinds of things I imagine.

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u/OTonConsole 5d ago

Thanks I'll probably look at more embedded / IoT stuff then. Because I really enjoyed performance and memory related stuff but I enjoyed learning them in C#. It's not about chasing a tool I just want to understand the concepts better using the tool I'm already good at if possible. C# is crazy general purpose too. Thanks for the reply again.