I spent 18 years in the Linux console and I don't regret it

At first, this article was going to be a grumbling about well-known ideas like: "Let's add support for objects in Bash instead of ObSoLeTe text and add support for images and GIFs in the commands' output."

But as I was writing it, it turned out to be a nostalgic text about the learning Linux in the province, in the early 2000s, without the Internet and other things that are familiar to us now. And with a continuation in more civilized places, with the obligatory red eyes from night coding, jumping between Linux distributions and, ultimately, finding zen.

It all started very prosaically — my grandparents bought me my first computer and invited a friend, who was a programmer, to come over. He showed to me how to use my first PC — and told me about another operating system called "Linux" that was popular with programmers and hackers. This information was stored somewhere in the back of my mind. Back then, I didn't have internet access, except for a 56 kB/s modem at school, to which I could use every 1-2 weeks for a few hours. So I couldn't download the Linux distribution to record it on a CD, and I had no idea I could even download it from the Internet. I got the Windows distribution from that programmer, and occasionally I'd rent other discs. Usually, there were no Linux distributions there — only repacks of GTA, Half-Life and other golden classics.

Back then, I was using Windows XP and spending a lot of time playing Counter-Strike with bots and playing through various famous single-player games. I already knew how to program in Pascal and I had the Turbo Pascal IDE and compiler, which I copied to a floppy disk from the school computer. Of course, I ran it in full-screen mode because it looked cool! Like in movies about hackers, where people did some kind of magic by typing in incomprehensible text.

Leave a Comment