• About

About

For those who are interested, my name is Bill Anderson. I do have a rather ancient resume hiding on my disk, but it is irrelevant as I am not looking for a full-time job. Just a quick thumbnail sketch of my background:

• While I built a homebrew calculator in 1963, my real involvement in computers started in 1968. The first machine I worked on was an RCA Spectra 70/55.
• In 1973, I built an IMSAI-8080 from scratch, no other choice. I still have it, and it still works. With only 64 megabytes of memory, it is a museum piece that collects dust.
• My involvement with UNIX began in 1978, when a friend convinced that I should help port Version 7 UNIX to an Onyx box with a Z8000, and a Corvus Shoebox disk (10 megabyte).
• I worked a Fortune System (another earlier UNIX vendor) as a product line engineering manager. Almost went to work for Sun, but more 70 hour weeks was just a little more than I wanted to face.
• In my collection, I have version of Linux going back to Caldera, which was the first distro that I really used. I had a 386 version of UnixWare, so Linux was not high on my list.
• By Fedora 3, I was hooked on Linux. Although I still have an ancient RS6000 box running AIX, and another box running the X86 version of Solaris. I really should get a Sun box as Sun does not know how to make an X86 version that really works.
• At present, I run about seven distros of Linux.
• My interest in the workings of the UNIX kernel started at Fortune Systems, and continues to this day. I am not a super-guru when it comes to the kernel, but I understand how it works on somedays. On other days, the code throws me off the deep end.

There are a lot of courses and books on Linux available, so there is no point in duplicating their work. In this blog, I am after the not so well documented areas. The things that are often not mentioned, but are rather critical when it comes to hunting down strange errors. The topics change according to what I am doing at the moment, and what inspires me.