Peter Curtis

Working in the information technology (IT) industry can be a grind, sometimes relegating you to the role of a underequipped tailor, as you try to sew together incompatible products, write code under impossible deadlines, and constantly explain why a project isn't as simple as it seems. It's easy to go home at night and not want to hear or see a thing about computers or Microsoft or Sun or ASPs or Web sites or e-commerce, ad infinitum. It can wear you down. But Linux came along, and it turned out to be one of those things that keeps me interested, even excited, about computers.

I was really a latecomer to the world of Linux. But when I started to learn about it, there was so much that appealed to me about its simplicity and power. In hindsight, it was simply the Unix philosophy that attracted me, but Linux was an embodiment of that philosophy that could actually run on my own system! So I very carefully installed Linux and set up my system for dual boot. As time went on, I found myself spending more and more time in Linux, especially as more and more useful applications starting coming out of that nebulous cloud known as the Internet. I switched to using Linux full time about two years ago, and I haven't looked back since, although I admit that my lilo.conf still has an entry to boot Windows 95.

Time to step in the way-back machine: My family got their first computer in 1982, when I was about 8 years old. It was a Timex Sinclair ZX81, now considered as much a classic among the computer set as the Model A Ford is among the classic-car set. I remember being fascinated with writing little BASIC programs and trying to fit them all inside the 2k of memory that came with the system. And I remember being really fascinated when my father found a clever little piece of software that gave the ZX81 an incredible 320 x 200-pixel high-resolution screen! I played around with it a little bit, but mostly I just wondered, " How does it work? " The rest, as they say, is history.

I ended up teaching myself Z80 assembly language. Shortly thereafter, we got a new computer ”a venerable Commodore 64 ”and I dropped Z80 assembly like a hot potato and picked up 6502 assembly. The 6502 was a classic chip! To this day I remember the 6502 instruction set with perfect clarity. As the CPU for the Commodore VIC-20, 64, and 128, not to mention the Apple II and III, it really powered the personal computer revolution in a way that Intel could only dream of years later. We had that computer for several years, and by the time we got our first Intel-based PC I had already written some very complex programs, including a role-playing game inspired by the Ultima series and a two-tasking system complete with virtual consoles. A 1-MHz clock and a fixed stack made that last exercise a little mind bending!

Programming in assembly language forces you to think about algorithms and about how computation is done. It forces you to think about decomposing a problem into its basic parts and putting them back together in the form of code, which are probably some of the same principles that Ritchie and Thompson had in mind back in 1969 when they created Unix. And that, in turn , explains my natural affinity for the Unix philosophy.

In the time I've used Linux, I've consistently been impressed by its enabling ability. As many people have observed , there's very little you can't do with Linux. The trick is to be creative, to know how to put things together to create something that's greater than the sum of its parts. This process is mirrored in the worldwide Open Source and Free Software communities; connected by the Internet, they become greater than the sum of their parts. And in the process, they've built a fantastic operating system and application collection that's both disturbing and elating the entire software industry. I hope this book can convey that sense of energy and creativity to you, the reader. And if you haven't used Linux much, I hope this book will convince you to give it a serious try, to see how Linux can help you do the things you want to do.

”Peter Curtis

April 2001