1978 - MTS mainframe at the University of Alberta
1981 - SuperPET
1983 - VIC-20
1985 - Apple II
1987 - Mac Plus
1987 - IBM PC - MSDOS
1991 - UNIX - University of Alberta
1992 - SGI - IRIX
1993 - Linux
After 1993, it's been all about Linux, with lots of SGI thrown in, some Sun, some AIX, some Windows, but basically all Linux.
I was listening to a Geek Entertainment TV podcast about the C64, and I'm glad I didn't get into the C64, having a VIC-20 taught me a lot, and got me onto the Apple II, which led to the Mac Plus. If I had stayed on the C64, I might have got stuck in the nostalgia for the system, kind of like a lot of Amiga and Atari people got stuck. It's all about the future.
Luckily, with Linux, you grow with the future, and that's all because it's free.
I've had so many times in my life where I've had to give up all the knowledge I learned about a system because it wasn't free, that's no fun.
People who are on Macs now with OSX are going to find that out, it's really painful when a developer stops supporting some software that you took a long time to learn, all that investment of time and knowledge that you made just disappears. After the first few times that happens, you start wishing for a more solid foundation.
Free Software is that solid foundation.
There's a lot of software that I keep updating, like I have the most recent version of Firefox all the time. But some of it, I just like the old version, like my enlightenment-0.16.5. It's 10 years old now, but I have it so perfectly customized to me, and there is nothing else that can do exactly what I want. If this was commercial software, I would be sad out of luck, but with Linux and the GPL, I have the source, and I can just keep tweaking it to make it run on the most modern linux distribution (Fedora 7 in my case).
I love Free Software.
