Spurred on by Bryan, I thought I should properly introduce myself:
I am a fairly young Unix devotee, having gotten my start with System V on a Wang word
processing system (believe it or not, they made one!), at my mother’s office, in the late
1980s. My first personal system, which ran SLS Linux, came about in 1992.
I am a member of the Vintage Computing Federation, and have given talks and made exhibits
on Unix history at VCF’s museum, in Wall, New Jersey. I have also had the pleasure to show
Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson, who are two of my computing heroes, my exhibit on the
origins of BSD Unix on the Intel 386. I learned C from Brian’s book, as probably did many
others here.
I have spent my entire professional career supporting Unix, in some form or another. I
started with SunOS at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, and moved
on to Solaris, HP-UX, SCO, and finally Linux. I worked for AT&T, in Virginia, in the
early 2000s, but there were few vestiges of Unix present, other than some 3b1 and 3b2
monitors and keyboards.
I current work for Red Hat, in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, as a principal sales engineer,
where I spend most of my time teaching and presenting at conferences, both in person and
virtual.
Thank you to everyone here who created the tools that have enabled my career and love of
computing!
- Alexander Jacocks
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