...making Linux just a little more fun!
Starting with his birth in 1959, Dave has repeatedly demonstrated
his ability to take things apart. Putting things back together has not
always been his strong point, however. He supressed his natural urge to disassemble the machines long enough
to learn to program in time-shared BASIC (with line numbers) in 1973, then
quickly moved to assembly language under CP/M - bare metal programming,
rather than bare metal (de)construction. A few computer science courses
and a couple of the usual academic programming languages later, he added
System V Unix system administrator to his qualifications, and decided
that disassembling programs rather than machines tends to leave fewer
spare parts (and lingering problems) around. After discovering what a real operating system could do, he was
ripe for a reduced bug count system to soothe his head after a long
day fighting the Redmondian demons, and the discovery of Slackware 2.x
combined with the availability of ever-faster internet access to finish
off any lingering pane. His current bill-paying work includes making production equipment work
(usually in spite of its owners) using programmable logic controllers
and sometimes making them talk to data collection systems. Since these
pursuits often require long stints dealing with Mr. Gates' finest, Linux
has truly become the sharpest tool in his shed - a copy of Knoppix goes
everywhere in his lunchbox and a Linux partition is always on his laptop,
for those occasions when only a real operating system will do.