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+ | Links to previous semesters opus/blog entires:\\ | ||
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+ | Fall 2014 - C/C++ and UNIX : {http:// | ||
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+ | Spring 2015 - HPC Fundamentals, | ||
+ | {http:// | ||
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+ | Fall 2015 - Data Structures : {http:// | ||
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+ | {{http:// | ||
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======Introduction====== | ======Introduction====== | ||
- | In this space you can provide | + | Welcome to this chronicling of my semester' |
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+ | I have spent most of my life working with computers, but not ever as a profession, and not always as a major interest or pursuit in my life. When I was maybe 7 or 8 years old, which would have been late 1980' | ||
+ | {{http:// | ||
+ | **Nintendo Entertainment System** | ||
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+ | In retrospect, however, the Commodore 64 was an AMAZING tool at the time for me to play with, the first computer I had unlimited access to. In grade school we used Apple II's | ||
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+ | {{http:// | ||
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+ | **Apple II Computer** | ||
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+ | but only for maybe an hour at a time once a week where we mostly did typing tutorials. | ||
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+ | {{http:// | ||
+ | **Commodore 64** | ||
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+ | This system used the old 5 and 1/4 inch floppy disks that predated the 3.5 inch disks that I used in middle and high school. But the whole system was a keyboard, a floppy disk drive and we had our TV used as our monitor, in addition to other periphials like some joysticks and a printer. | ||
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+ | {{http:// | ||
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+ | **Commodore 64 command line on the left, A Hello World program in BASIC on the right.** | ||
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+ | Once in middle school we had moved on to a Windows 3.1 system on top of DOS 5.0, in which we booted up to DOS and started windows manually from within DOS. Some of our programs ran in DOS including America Online 2.0 and Doom, and others ran in Windows like Sim City 2000, Wordperfect, | ||
+ | [[http:// | ||
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+ | {{http:// | ||
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+ | **Windows 3.1 on the top left, Sim City 2000 on the top right, Doom on the bottom.** | ||
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+ | Around this time period in my life was when I was first discovering the Internet, which was a vast unknown that fascinated me. We used dial-up connections to connect to AOL 2.0 and up for the next several years. | ||
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+ | {{http:// | ||
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+ | **Grandpa Simpson, from the "The Simpsons" | ||
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+ | we only got like "20 hours per month" for our monthly subscription, | ||
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+ | {{http:// | ||
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+ | **Top: One of the early America Online main menus, Bottom: Video of AOL dial up connection noises.** | ||
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+ | In high school I took a programming class and learned some Pascal and I remember none of it at this point, but it was my first real formal teaching of any programming language. I used Windows 95 and 98 through high school and into my first time at Corning Community College on my home computer. | ||
+ | this was also literally | ||
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+ | {{http:// | ||
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+ | **Macintosh Computer made by Apple, Inc.** | ||
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+ | In college I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I had a different major almost every semester I was in college which is why I ultimately ended up with an A.S. in Liberal Arts. My best friend from high school went away to college for electrical engineering and this is where I first heard about Linux, just off the cuff and in passing conversations, | ||
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+ | **" | ||
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+ | After a lot of hair pulling, I had successfully set up a dual boot system, which was alot harder then than it is today. | ||
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+ | {{http:// | ||
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+ | **Top: Ubuntu running the GNOME Desktop environment, | ||
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+ | ...I bailed on Ubuntu as I despised Unity in its early days. I tried many of the popular distros: Fedora, Mint, OpenSuse, Debian. | ||
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+ | {{http:// | ||
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+ | **Top: My actual desktop from a few years ago running Arch Linux with wmii tiling window manager, Bottom: Another actual desktop of mine from a couple years ago running Gentoo with the GNOME desktop.** | ||
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+ | Later I decided also that I am officially game for trying any distro, so I learned and used Gentoo for over a year, used Slackware for a while, and made a failed attempt at Linux From Scratch on a virtual machine becuase the toolchain never compiled correctly, at some point I want to re-attempt to do that. I also have no experience with any of the BSD's and I want to at least use them enought to be familiar with how they operate. | ||
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+ | Later I set up a machine at home with a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) not for any real purpose, other than to 1) see if I could, 2) learn how to run a webserver and learn system admin like stuff and experiment. | ||
+ | [[http:// | ||
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+ | {{http:// | ||
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+ | **My geeky section of my bookshelf.** | ||
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+ | I have repos both on [[https:// | ||
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+ | --Matthew Page 08/ | ||