UNIT ONE

Well, that didn't take long!

Well folks, it's just the beginning of this class and I guess for me, it's kind of make or break. If I can make it through this class and even retain the slightest part of the content, I will hopefully have a clearer understanding of Linux, UNIX and the cold heartless realm of the command environment. Part of me thinks that if I could have ever gotten my brain wrapped around it, I would have done so already and having been exposed to the BASIC programming language in the summer of 1982, maybe that just might be the case. Nevertheless, this is the first time I have had formal, academic training in this powerful mode of computing since the rise of the internet.

I know a lot more about "computer concepts" than "Computer practice"

I have been enthralled by the ideas of open source software since I was first exposed to it in about 1998 when there was some publicity on the financial media about LINUX and Linus Torvalds himself and his radically community inclined ideas of distributing software creation and bug fixing throughout an entire not-so-organized community. That's all good, but now I personally must roll up my sleeves and dig into the work. My first query on the Ubuntu user site was about "How can someone who came to understand working and navigating across networks in the GUI Windows Explorer era build a mental model to perceive working in the UNIX/Linux command line universe?

Well, this response to someone asking about "Virtual terminals"seems to help me out a little. For some reason the metaphor of teletypes, an early precursor to, say, a fax machine which is text only is really helping me right now. Teletypes were essentially networked typewriters which could communicate over (usually dedicated) phone lines. A user at one end would enter text by typing and then the user at the other end would get a typewritten text message.  That notion of computers being "glass teletypes" fits in well.

http://askubuntu.com/questions/14284/why-is-a-virtual-terminal-virtual-and-what-why-where-is-the-real-terminal

I guess my first working experience with the internet was a cruddy beige UNIX machine where everything was menu-driven and I input data, composed emails and did very crude searches on what was then called a UNIX dumb terminal.
As I mentioned above, when I worked at a more modern workplace, three years later I got a lot of help conceiving of where I was on the network with Microsoft's Explorer bar, a bar on the left of the screen that showed your computer as a terminal in the office network. Occasionally, I had to take care of work that was on a coworker's computer or utilize their software remotely from my computer. The Explorer Bar helped me keep that stuff straight. UNIX doesn't have anything like that, so I frequently can't figure out in which directory I am currently working.