Remembering the LAN
I started programming in the 1990s living above my parent’s medical practice. We had 15 PCs for the business, and one for me. The standard OS was MS-DOS. The network started off using IPX over coax to a Novell Netware server, the fanciest software we ever owned. IPX was so much easier than TCP/IP. No DHCP and address allocation, it just worked.
Eventually the PCs would run Windows, and a Windows NT server took over file sharing over TCP/IP. The business software survived this transition unchanged, though there was more operational overhead. We assigned IPs manually.
Home was a small town in Northern Australia. The internet was far off for me at this point, and would remain so longer than it did elsewhere. Eventually we would be able to make long-distance phone calls 2000 miles to try it out for a few minutes here and there. (At this point Americans had AOL.)
Before we had internet there were some lackluster local BBSs, and at one point a local university account my father acquired (somehow or other, none of us were students or university employees) that we could dial into and try out my first Unix on a Sun box. It was a limited experience even though technically it was on an internet link. My distance from university culture meant I wouldn’t see Linux until the mid-90s, when we picked up a copy of Slackware on a trip to Hong Kong. I didn’t really get Unix until I used OpenBSD, which put enough of the pieces together for me for Unix to finally make sense.
