Past Classes and Presentations

IPv4 Class circa 1999

One of the presentations I do have is from the New Orleans Linux Users Group (NOLUG) that a friend of mine and I put together a class on IPV4 addressing around 1999. There was no recording of the presentation, but I still have the copies of the write-up that Scott put in docbook form. Even though that class was almost 25 years ago at the time of this writing, Scott says that the files are still the most downloaded thing from all of his websites. Guess we did a decent job of putting together the class and the documents. Here is the links:

Routers and Firewalls

Another presentation I did was for the Silicon Slopes BUG that we ran in Lehi, UT at the Abobe Offices was the one about setting up routers and firewalls using BSD products. All I have is the recording of the presentation, and it is the unedited raw footage, but it is all I got. Also I am linking the .odp presentation files i put together for the class. The recording was done using Bluejeans, iirc. Any questions please feel free to ask.
Download MP4 recording
Download Routers-and-firewalls presentation file

History of Unix and Like Operating Systems

One of my obsessions since the 80s has been operating systems. This includes CP/M, mainframe systems, DOS and all the early systems. My very first *nix experience was around Christmas of 1996. Back there there was little to no Internet, and software was not as easy to get as it is today. I lived in Houston and was working for Lyondell-Citgo Refining on the Houston Ship channel. In the Galleria area of Houston, there was a huge computer store there calle MicroCenter. They had a huge rack that took up an entire row with "shareware" and "freeware" titles, most of them costing around 10 dollars each or less. A few were higher going as high as 25 dollars or so. This was long before the term open source software existed. One huge supplier of those cheap CDs was Walnut Creek CDrom, which is now pretty famous for what they did for open source back in the day. For Christmas that year, my wife at the time got me a copy of FreeBSD 2.1.5 on Walnut Creek CDRrom, a couple of other disks, including a FreeBSD documentation CD. She also got me a copy of System Commander. What System Commander allowed you to do was to boot an almost unlimited number of Operating Systems on one computer. My playing around with System Commander and what Operating Systems was what drove my desire to even work on computers.

Operating Systems that I have used over the years include: CP/M, DOS, FreeBSD, Novell Netware, BeOS, Windows 3, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT and any other verison of Windows ever created. Linux I have played with almost every distro in existence back during the 90s and the early days of Linux. I still try to keep up with the lay of distros, but that is a lot harder these days. If you don't believe me, go look on https://distrowatch.org and look at the shear number of Linux Distros out there.

Now I realize I am an equivelant of an dinosaur in the computer world considering I started on mainframes and DOS. But one area that not many of today's computer professionals know or understand the history of computers and operating systems. Most don't even remember all the not so cool business tactics done by Microsoft, let alone where they came from, what drove their invention, and factors in industry driving them. One thing most people in the US do not remember or realize that FreeBSD pre-dates most other operating systems. In the early days of the Internet, the entire Internet was run on FreeBSD. To this day there are huge sections of the services on the internet run on FreeBSD. Tons of well known and well funded companies like Cisco, Sony, and Juniper Networks, to name a few, their entire offering was written 100% on BSD Software. Netflix has publicly talked about and published why FreeBSD is used to stream movies and is way more stable and faster than other OSs. Your playstation, no matter what version you have is running modified FreeBSD on it. It is all around and you have no idea you are even using a BSD product.

Lots of major history events have occurred that no one today seems to remember. Why are they important? They shaped everythign about how we use computers today. Do you remember the SCO Lawsuit? Where SCO and a total scumbag at SCO tried to sue the world and claimed he owned all of Linux. He was a liar, an idiot, and one of the most hated people in industry. Do you remember that Linux Torvalds said the only reason he wrote Linux and didn't just use FreeBSD was the lawsuit from AT&T who sued UC Berkley and claimed that FreeBSD belonged to them? Sad thing is I see a lot of history repeating itself because people do not bother to learn and remember history.

I put together a presentation that I did at a couple of meetups, including the Silicon Slopes BUG, that covers the history of Unix and Unix-like Operating systems. There is a common lineage of ALL *nix systems that goes all the way back to Bell Labs in the 70s. The early days of Unix were dominated by names that everyone should remember, people like Dennis Ritchie,you know, the guy who invented C language along with who knows how many other things. Below is the slides I did for the presentation. I hope it helps people think about the history of operating systems and where we came from.

FreeBSD Desktop How-To