Unix is my favorite environment, its the environment I use for almost all of my daily work since 1994 and its the environment which is open and free enough for me to feel confident that it will stay like this for quite some time to come.

Picture from 1972, showing Ken Thompson (sitting) and Dennis Ritchie (standing) infront of a PDP-11, with two Teletype 33 terminals.

My flavors

I do all my daily work on GNU/Linux. My first unix flavor was SLS back in 1993, and when Slackware came out, I switched to that, and kept it for many years until 1998 where I changed to Debian (hamm at that time). Since 1998 it has been only Debian on my Desktops.

I've had other alike systems too, for example a little Sparctation LX which was running Solaris7 and Debian slink. Now my brother is using this system. Among other systems has been an old runout HP9000 from university with HP-UX, and an IBM AS/400 which I still havent got to run Linux.

In my professional life, I have been working with different other flavors of Unix, like:

During my first 2 years at university

we used DEC Ultrix on an old VAX machine which was accessed through a PC-console telnet client. It was only possible to access the Internet (at amazing 64kbit/s frame relay) through this machine, so it was often brought to its knees when more than 20 of the 500 students were running screen at the same time. Finally screen was banned, and you had to name your binaries like ”talk-server” to confuse the admins.

At the third year

I moved to a place where they had HP-UX on HP9000 servers with X-terminals in the data corners. The Internet connection was amazing 10Mbit/s, very good at the time. The servers were albeit quite slow because of many users and CPU-consuming compile and project tasks running on them.

My first job at SOL

We used SUN servers with Solaris. These were some very cool systems to me. Also because unlike earlier, I was getting admin rights over these "big" boxes (eg. SUN Enterprise 450).

At this job

I also used FreeBSD for the first year on my desktop. It was amazingly smooth to work with, however I like the ease of kernel-upgrade in Linux, so when I got a new PC there, I got it with Linux on.

I know that there are many arguments which of these are Unix and not, thats why I put the name flavors.

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