My Journey

In the beginning...¶

It was 1982. I was in 5^th grade. My school was one of the first ones to get a computer lab. Someone donated a whole network to our school: 10 Commodore 64 computers, a network printer and a server. The only faculty staff member qualified to manage all these was our English teacher, not because she knew the first thing about computers, but because, being a native English speaker, she could read the 1000-page manual that came with the equipment. The server managed a unique ID code for each student (mine was 87, easy to remember ) and had various educational programs installed on it. We used the computer lab to practice simple math problems and build our English vocabulary and grammar. The teacher had to load the relevant program for that day's lesson on the server. Once the program launched, as the computers were networked, they would all show the same thing on screen; each of us would then enter his (or her) unique ID code and start working.

Obviously, it didn't always work as intended...

I always liked to solve puzzles and find out what made things tick, so, naturally, I immediately got hooked. I felt right at home, and, to my parents' surprise, I discovered a natural technical understanding of those mysterious machines.
And so I started helping the teacher to solve the various problems she encountered when trying to understand how to make it all work. And that's how I became the official computer expert at the school, and as such, had virtually unlimited access to the computer lab.

A few short years later, I got the same computer we used at the school's computer lab as my Bar Mitzvah present. My father was dumbfounded that I gave up a 10-day shopping trip to New York for a computer:

But that's just how it all started .

My First Job¶

This humble start launched me into a 34-year career as a computer professional.

In the early 90s, I started working as a PC technician at a mom-and-pop shop right out Army service. After six months of underpaid, mind-numbing work, a friend of mine offered me a position at a new ISP company, as part of the Technical Support team. I immediately jumped at the chance to be part of the brand-new Internet revolution. I spent a few years at that company, learning a lot. It's there that I was introduced to the Unix OS. To be able to diagnose and troubleshoot the customers' problems, we had to use a Telnet client to connect to the system's back end. I didn't really understand exactly what I was doing, but I was, in fact, using Unix commands. That experience helped me later, as I discovered GNU/Linux for the first time.

The Big Switch¶

A few more years passed. In the late 90s it was hard to find work in the IT field; the market was saturated with people looking for a job in the field. I was renting a room in an apartment in Jerusalem. One of my roommates started his Computer Sciences degree at the university. One day he brought a Red Hat 4.2 installation CD. At the time, I spent hours struggling to make Microsoft Windows 98 work on my PC. When I first laid eyes on the black and green terminal window of the Red Hat OS, I fell in love: An actual CLI-based OS that just worked!

I begged him to burn me a copy (not considered software piracy, even encouraged!). 6 useless CD coasters later (he had a very unstable computer running Microsoft Windows XP and a 2X Sony CD burner), I had my very own copy of Red Hat 4.2, my first GNU/Linux installation CD!

After spending an afternoon backing up my data, I installed Red Hat Linux on a spare hard drive, just to check everything worked. Once I discovered all my files and hardware were usable, I formatted my primary drive and installed Red Hat Linux on it - and have never looked back since!

That was August of 1999. Since that day, I used Linux exclusively on my computers.

The move to Ubuntu¶

After I gained some experience, I tried several distributions. The second one was Mandrake Linux (that later became Mandriva). I used it for a few short years until a young South African philanthropist by the name of Mark Shuttleworth started the development of the Ubuntu Desktop OS. The first version of Ubuntu came out in October 2004. Coincidentally, that was the first Ubuntu I ever used, and has been the only GNU/Linux distribution I've used since.

Today¶

Nowadays, 22 years later, I am completing a 10-year tenure as the Linux System Administrator for the Cognitive Robotics lab at the Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences of the Technion.

As part of my job, I maintain some 30 Ubuntu workstations and servers. I provide basic Linux CLI usage training and support to the Lab's students.

And that's my journey (so far) with computers and GNU/Linux.

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