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Date:      Fri, 19 Jun 1998 08:30:31 -0700 (PDT)
From:      David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com>
To:        newbies@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Lists, newbies & support (was: Re: Where to get Windows Internet stuff/ More on Windows & BSD)
Message-ID:  <199806191530.IAA15262@pau-amma.whistle.com>

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>Date: Thu, 18 Jun 1998 16:46:30 -0700
>From: Tim Gerchmez <fewtch@serv.net>

>Newbies are generally those who are in their first few weeks or months of
>learning BSD....

Really?  Why do you say that?

Folks who have seen this (from me) before, please feel free to skip
it... but my point is that generally, there is a fair amount of
diversity in the community; the unifying force is that freebsd-newbies
tends to be populated by folks who are new to FreeBSD (or who have an
interest, no matter how pathological[:-)] in the experiences of those
of us who are new to FreeBSD).

I'm still fairly new to FreeBSD.  I'm not "new" to any of BSD, UNIX,
system administration, programming, computing, networks, routing, wiring,
or lots of other things (including Computer Science).  I'm certainly
willing to provide my perspectives (warped though they may be) to others;
this note is a case in point.

I get the impression that some folks assume that what's "new" to "newbies"
here is UNIX or BSD, while the denizens are already familiar with PCs.
Well, in my case, that's inverted:  my prior experience with PC hardware
has been minimal (and fairly unpleasant); my prior experience with
Microsoft environments has not only also been minimal, but has been so
unpleasant that I've largely repressed it.  "Windows" to me refers to "the
X Windows System".  "DOS" refers to the operating system on the first
s/360 (it was a model 30 with 4 MB RAM) that I used at a school (back in
1970).  (Actually, I recall feeling that the use of "bytes" to measure
memory capacity was just a cheap way to artificially inflate the
apparent resources of the machine.  The first machine I used was an IBM
1130, with 8 K 16-bit words of real core; words 0, 1, & 2 did
double-duty as the index registers.)

Another respect in which my perceptions differ from some others is that
I only use FreeBSD here at work; it's one of the UNIX environments I
administer.  (It's also the bulk of what I administer.)  At home, I use
SunOS 4.1.1_U1 on the Sun 3/60, and Solaris 2.6 (current recommended patch
cluster installed as of a couple of weekends ago, when they released
105552-02, I think it was -- the 2.6 version of the rpc.nisd patch) on a
SPARCstation 5/110.)

I'll grant that my case may well not be the norm... but I doubt that --
in that respect! -- I'm actually unique.

david
-- 
David Wolfskill		UNIX System Administrator
dhw@whistle.com		voice: (650) 577-7158	pager: (650) 371-4621

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