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Hi there Amazing story - I am but a lightweight in comparison. Coming out of the steelworks in Sheffield, and after a wobbly start in higher education, picked up a PhD researching "more good that could be explained by any known theory" German and Japanese steels, I needed computing. I needed to "supercompute" a predicted outcome and find if observation matched theory. Linux had arrived when I asked this question in about late 1996. The concept that your "office computer" could become as solid as The Rock of Gibraltar. I went no further than fitting a second hard-disk to the computer - original keeping the "Windows" and new having the Linux and all files from that working environment. This is nothing in terms of what you have done - but I was getting program run times of like 14 hours, when then Windows95 would "crash"/"fall-over" about every 4 hours... Oh gawd when in the US I had some person of seemingly thoughts flowing at the rate of treacle insisting that computing be Windows - when I was recruited as a person with foundry/hot-metal background - and - did computing... Basically I could be sprayed with molten metal in the foundry and go compute about what we found after taking off my fireproof gear and having a tea (they drink coffee - my coffees are special short "megablasters" and in general I drink tea, being British). Around 1997 when doing my Doctorate - my computer sold "with Windows95, Word and Excel pre-installed" was the fastest computer in the area of that university - certainly with a known performance (3.5Magaflops to about 16 sig.figs (8-byte floats)). I had a couple of folk from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science come compile programs on my computer and run their algorithms. I have then since simply been "in the background", doing this text-based computing not leaving "flat" text unless it inherently is so - images, etc. I program in Lisp now - most of the time using the Emacs Lisp of the emacs interpreter. All ad-hoc. tasks. None noteworthy. Always useful. The Skinner's brewery and "Betty Stoggs" beer had me stagger off the bus deciding "now is the time to do that server-side programmed Contact-form!" which went onward to a program which enabled you to plot your mate's garden shed on a nautical chart then to - an online beam calculator. All in PHP. Done no more since. http://weldsmith.co.uk/cgi_my/ebbeam_rhs/230724_ebbeam_rhs.html "Rectangular Hollow Section beam calculator" Back happily using emacs lisp for mathematically trivial but engineeringly surprisingly useful bits of calculation. Nothing like your illustrious endeavours, but anyway, welcome to the group. If - seems a distant dream - things "calm down" for me I would be interested in developing what opportunities the "Raspberry Pi" presents. Rich Smith > On 10 Oct 2023, at 05:56, Helen McCall <helen.wildnfree@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Hello Members of Devon and Cornwall Gnu/Linux User Group. > > I am writing this post as a brief introduction to myself, for the group. > > I am a retired research scientist living in Plympton St Maurice. I > first learnt to program computers using ALGOL in the 1960s, at Hatfield > Polytechnic. I went on to use various mainfame computers, mostly ICL > Prime series running PRIMOS. I went on to tinker with various > microcomputers such as Z80 based machines running CP/M, BBC Micro, and > Acorn Archimedes. In the 1980s I had wanted to buy an Acorn Archimedes, > but couldn't afford it at the time, and so bought a second hand Canon > AS100 running CP/M-86. That computer had a truly massive hard disk > drive in its own cabinet, the size of a modern PC tower case, and had a > capacity of a whopping great 5MB! > > At this time, in the 1980s, I switched from using mainframes to using > Unix workstations including those from IBM, Silicon Graphics, and Sun > SparcStation. I worked on several projects including the design of > equipment used for calibrating Earth Observation satellites, and did > some early research developing mathematical techniques for machine > vision and machine learning. In those days, we had to build the digital > cameras ourselves. And email had to be manually routed! > > In the mid 1990s I had started designing myself a simple Unix > workstation built from computer scrap I saved from the laboratory skip, > to run the Minix cut down version of Unix. I then discoved that a young > man called Linus Torvalds in Finland had been doing the same, but had > given up with the awful Minix system, and designed his own Linux. I > experimented with shoehorning the first distributions of Yggdrazil and > Slackware onto my Frankenstein's monster of a scrap-built computer, but > fortunately then discovered the Debian version 1, which was a lot > better put together, and just needed me to adapt a few drivers to work > with the computer I had built from an odd assortment of bits and pieces > from things like a Silicon Graphics Iris, and Kontron Analyser, and > other diverse computing objects. > > That electrified scrap-heap running Debian Gnu/Linux fast became my > favourite workstation, much to the chagrin of my institue director who > kept telling me he wanted me to use a modern PC running that awful MS > Windows operating system. I resisted that idiot's demands, and have > been using Debian ever since, whilst building myself better and better > workstations out of the much higher quality scrap that the computer > department kept quietly passing my way whenever things broke down on > their system. > > To cut a long story short; in 2012 a friend gave me a present of the > new Raspberry Pi model B (the original one with the short gpio). I > loved that Raspberry Pi at first sight. It reminded me of the simple > elegance of the Acorn Archimedes I had once wanted. And it even used > Debian Gnu/Linux as its official operating system, and had the option > of using it with the RISCOS operating system like with the Acorn > Archimedes. I still have that original Model B, which I intend to use > next year to teach myself ARM Assembly, because over the best part of > the last sixty years, I've used nearly 40 different programming > languages, and think it is time I added ARM Assembly to the list. > > Currently I am using a Raspberry Pi 4B as my workstation, and am > looking forward to getting a 5B next year. My RPI 4B is the most > powerful computer I have ever used, and is also the most fun to use. > The 5B is very much better, so I will be in clover next year! > > Lots of love, > Helen McCall > -- > The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG > FAQ: https://www.dcglug.org.uk/faq/ -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG FAQ: https://www.dcglug.org.uk/faq/