The Open Software movement
Comment from E-mail
I just want you to know that you helped inspire me to get involved with computers and electronics. Reading articles in Popular Science, and a computer hobbyist magazine that I can’t remember, I do remember the articles featured tinkering with the Osborne, Mac and the computer I was going to get.. The Ohio Scientific. I never got the Ohio Scientific, but I did build my own kit computer when I was 15, the Ace 2000, it was a clone of the old Sinclair boxes.
I later went to college to get an Electronic Engineering Degree. I designed access control systems for a while and started to write interface programs in C for the PCs. Later I picked up Unix and now I work as a “Systems Engineer” basically I design networks, program routers, unix system admin, perl scripts.. stuff like that.
I’d like to get your opinion of the Open Software movement. I run Linux on a G3 and have been very impressed with it’s robustness.
Woz
You clearly came from the early computer days.
You can basically find lots of jobs but there’s always way to much to know and learn to do it all in your field.
I like the motivations of the Open Software movement. It is probably the only way things can change in the OS world nowadays. No company could do what this movement is doing. I’m told that many many companies are developing hardware based on Linux (I have a TIVO) and are telling Microsoft that they are concentrating on Windows versions of software when they are really putting their main efforts into Linux versions. It makes sense.
One of my current woes is that I only get free time slots long enough to start reading my Linux installation manuals, and by the time I get back it’s too late for that version, and I’ve never quite gotten there. Of course, 10 hours of email a day and lots of other normal human tasks get in the way of many things like that.