 Hi, my name is Stephen J. Von Nichols. I write about this stuff. Wow, there I am in My old office. I have a much nicer office now So how does someone with a liberal arts degrees and who you know, I'm an English and history guy How does someone like me end up in Linux? Well, I'll tell you how Once upon a time there. I was a newly-minute PhD in history with all those job offers Just pouring into me Geez What could I just do? Well, I'll tell you what I could do. I discovered that I could read Good-scale reading. Don't you think I could write and I could do research I also discovered and this I did not know I'm one of those people who I just get computers So So the little clicker doesn't work Little clicker There we go and So there I was I Could get computers I could read I could write I actually ended up in guess what computer science and in technology and I started out actually in Working with IBM free 60 mainframes My first language was IBM free 60 assembler You don't want that to be your first language You really don't and then I found a PDP 1170 and what was running on that PDP 1170 a come on folks. You should know this basic history Unix that's right and I thought geez this is good stuff I can use this and so I started picking up Unix and Now I discovered that technology still doesn't work Ha, there we go and from there. I discovered you know what I like this enough. I want it on a desktop Say hi to my first Unix desktop anyone anyone else here use this thing? Yeah It ran system 5 release 3.2 Unix back in the day and that's where I picked up that And it was nifty and it was neat and it got me thinking I can also Besides speaking C. I could speak English That's a rare combination And so it was I started writing about this stuff first just to other technology people and then I discovered I could Translate from C to English to people who think that C is a litter in the alphabet between B and D And that's all they know and so it was that I started working on things like Open desktop anyone here used to work with that one good old open desktop Also known as open deftrap because once you are in it terrible things could happen to you Terrible terrible things and at the time though there were other people Who were doing things on the shell level and goodness knows I know shell and I remember when the big user interface It's based were between C and born shell and then eventually something called born again shell And so I was doing all this and I was starting to write about it and making a living at it and then Along came this thing called Linux and I remember back when Gosh, I forget what year it is now, but we're about going on 25 years of Linux. We're getting close to that and I discovered that Linux was actually neat that this little finished graduate student with a really funny name on The Minix news group was on to something and so I started working with Linux starting with the release 0.0 free Which Linus will tell you was the first one that really worked and so it is I Took my background of liberal arts reading writing and research added to it my ability to do interesting things with computers and On top of that I added what I think and I think most of us in this room would agree is Still the most powerful operating system today as it gets near to its age It gets near to its first quarter century and that's how it is that someone who Really studied East Africa and diplomatic history and English Renaissance drama and I'm not making that up ended up Making a living about writing about Linux and using Linux because it's not just for technical people It's not just for engineers. It's also for people like me who just really like great operating systems and great tools Thank you very much for your time