10 Years Ago

I was using Windows. I didn’t know about Linux and it wasn’t quite known in my university. But things changed 2 years after that. The university started making sure that most of the colleges and departments had free and open source software running. That was an interesting beginning because, of course, the changes meant that it was enforced in practically all the labs at the university. Back then students only had microfloppy disks and not USB flashdrives. Not a lot of us had laptops in the state university. That change was painful as the floppy drives were not easily mounted and unmounted by what we were using then. Some labs had Linux, some had BSD. Some had GNOME, some had KDE. It was, in some ways, chaotic. People didn’t really know how to adjust. The junior sys admins were highly in demand during that time. They had to make sure those floppy disks were ejected properly!

Being in college and learning about this new thing called Linux, this new thing called BSD — those were exciting times! I couldn’t use it at home because my family would never stop bugging me about it when they encounter problems. Also, my mom and sister would have needed other applications that were mainly available for something Windows-based. Not having internet access at home at that time made it almost impossible for me to switch to Linux because there was almost no one to ask about it at school. Only a handful had the skill and experience in using Linux and BSD.

Fast track to 4-5 years ago. I had another bout with Windows 98 at home and I was getting sick and tired of it. Then Linux came along and happened. Mandrake was a pretty nifty distro which looked good and felt great to use. And then Debian and then Ubuntu came along. It was mainly Ubuntu from that point on. I could easily mount and eject flashdrives and CD ROMs. That was one big thing for me. Then there have been many good changes with OpenOffice.org and then many more free and open source applications have been developed so that was really cool. And now I am looking at switching to Moblin on my netbook because of the user interface.

It’s amazing to look back and see the changes in the last ten years. What was it like 10 years ago for you and your Linux usage?