[KLUG Advocacy] Linux tutor.

[Adam Williams]

> > Right, you could dial up via someone like Delphi and get into
> > sunsite.unc.edu.  Gold Mine!  I didn't know anything about licensing,  
> > I just knew I could get it and didn't care.  
> Exactly.  Did software even come with a license back then?
> I don't remember, and probably didn't even look at the time.

Right.

> > Although I did learn to loath Imake.
> There's a horror from the past!  Wow did that suck!!!

Yes it did.  And now people complain about autogen, automake, and
configure scripts.  Whatever!  Just please, not Imake!

> > And restore the system image to a different workstation, with different
> > hardware - Linux cares how much?  You might have to reconfigure X and
> > sound.  Windows XP?  Hah!
> How about "upgrades"?  Got a NT workstation you'd like to make into a NT
> server?  Guess what, you can't upgrade, it's reinstall time!  I suspect
> the same is true today with XP (switching from home to pro or whatever).

No you can't upgrade pro -> server -> advanced server.  At least so I'm
told.  You can upgrade from home -> pro, I've done it.  (Dumb users who
go to Best Buy and buy a laptop - then can't connect to anything. 
Another $189 of their money, Oh well.  I'm terribly sympathetic.)

> Not to mention if you want to upgrade 9x to NT to 2K to XP to 2003 ...

Right;  you are joking?

> > Of course you did inherit some limitations - no excel, etc...  But at
> > the time these really weren't considered earth shaking, if most of the
> > people even knew what a spreadsheet was (cough, most still don't but
> > think they do)
> There were (are?) spreadsheets (and word-processors) that would run on a

Sure.

> dumb terminal in a curses(-like?) interface.  We ran some for awhile,

So did we.

> but once windowing environments started coming out, our users didn't
> want to have anything to do with them any longer.

True, but that didn't become an issue until the late ninties - not for
most of the clerical end workers anyway.   We have the "advantage" in
our industry that technical proficiency as a rule is VERY VERY *LOW*. 
We still have competitors with just peer-to-peer Win9x networks and
e-mail accounts through AOL.  Most have an AIX box somewhere to run the
industry standard COBOL application (which is pretty ubiquitous),  but
if a user gets screwed up or a printer won't come up --- THEY REBOOT THE
MACHINE!  No joke,  they simply have NO IDEA what kind of system their
working with.  When a bunch of material handling people get together
they will invariably complain about how unstable their IBM systems are. 
The first one of these I went to (for IT people in the material handling
business), they asked for topics, etc...  So I did a short (like 10
minutes) bit on Samba figuring most of these people had Win9x boxes,
etc...   We are talking jaws-on-the-floor, wide-eye,
deer-in-the-headlights, blushing-virgin STUNNED!  "You can do that!"  It
was *sad*.