Peter Curtis
Working in the information technology (IT)
industry can be a grind, sometimes relegating you to the role of a
underequipped tailor, as you try to sew together incompatible products, write
code under impossible deadlines, and constantly explain why a project isn't as
simple as it seems. It's easy to go home at night and not want to hear or see a
thing about computers or Microsoft or Sun or ASPs or Web sites or e-commerce,
ad infinitum. It can wear you down. But Linux came along, and it turned out to
be one of those things that keeps me interested, even excited, about computers.
I was really a latecomer to the world of
Linux. But when I started to learn about it, there was so much that appealed to
me about its simplicity and power. In hindsight, it was simply the Unix
philosophy that attracted me, but Linux was an embodiment of that philosophy
that could actually run on my own system! So I very
carefully installed Linux and set up my system for dual boot. As time went
on, I found myself spending more and more time in Linux, especially as more and
more useful applications starting coming out of that nebulous cloud known as
the Internet. I switched to using Linux full time about two years ago, and I
haven't looked back since, although I admit that my lilo.conf
still has an entry to boot Windows 95.
Time to step in the way-back machine: My
family got their first computer in 1982, when I was about 8 years old. It was a
Timex Sinclair ZX81, now considered as much a classic among the computer set as
the Model A Ford is among the classic-car set. I remember being fascinated with
writing little BASIC programs and trying to fit them all inside the 2k of
memory that came with the system. And I remember being
little piece of software that gave the ZX81 an incredible 320 x 200-pixel
high-resolution screen! I played around with it a little bit, but mostly I just
wondered, "
The rest, as they say, is history.
I ended up teaching myself Z80 assembly
language. Shortly thereafter, we got a new computer�a venerable Commodore
64�and I dropped Z80 assembly like a hot potato and picked up 6502 assembly. The
6502 was a classic chip! To this day I remember the 6502 instruction set with
perfect clarity. As the CPU for the Commodore VIC-20, 64, and 128, not to
mention the Apple II and III, it really powered the personal computer
revolution in a way that Intel could only dream of years later. We had that
computer for several years, and by the time we got our first Intel-based PC I
had already written some very complex programs, including a role-playing game
inspired by the Ultima series and a two-tasking system complete with virtual
consoles. A 1-MHz clock and a fixed stack made that last exercise a little mind
bending!
Programming in assembly language
computation is done. It forces you to think about decomposing a problem into
its basic parts and putting them back together in the form of code, which are
probably some of the same principles that Ritchie and Thompson had in mind back
in 1969 when they created Unix. And that, in turn, explains my natural affinity
for the Unix philosophy.
In the time I've used Linux, I've
consistently been impressed by its enabling ability. As many people have
observed, there's very little you can't do with
Linux. The trick is to be creative, to know how to put things together to
create something that's greater than the sum of its parts. This process is
mirrored in the worldwide Open Source and Free Software communities; connected
by the Internet, they become greater than the sum of their parts. And in the
process, they've built a fantastic operating system and application collection
that's both disturbing and elating the entire software industry. I hope this
book can convey that sense of energy and creativity to you, the reader. And if
you haven't used Linux much, I hope this book will convince you to give it a
serious try, to see how Linux can help you do the things you want to do.
�Peter Curtis
April 2001
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