A walk down ‘computer’ memory lane.

35 years ago, I’ve completed my first logon to a Unix system from an ASCII-terminal. This anniversary is the perfect moment to reflect and take a walk down ‘computer’ memory lane.

That first Unix box was a 16-bit Altos Computer based on 68000 chip running System III. One megabyte memory system, with half a megabyte swap space. Real swapping, not paging space: programs were put in its entirety to disk when memory was scarce.

That system was a perfect learning school for C, to understand the difference between a 16-bit integer and a 32-bit pointer, if you didn’t declare memory allocation (malloc) as an external function returning a pointer, for sure you would received a lot of SIGSEGV signals causing core dumps. A similar issue in more recent decades when moving from 32-bit to 64-bit architectures.

In my student days, I discovered my first security bugs, like submitting a cron-job and using chown to make it execute as root.

A year later, moving to a 32-bit Gould Encore Systems, running UTX-32 Unix-based OS which contained almost all features from both BSD and System V. Here I wrote my first system call: to lock a process into memory, so that it couldn’t be swapped out to disk, a trick used to improve benchmarking.

In 1985 it was time to bring my first Unix @ Home, since Linux started only in 1991, I started to work with SCO Xenix V/286.

Till then in Europe, there was little permanent network connectivity, not everyone was connected to Arpanet, the predecessor of today’s Internet. Computers were connected through dial-up connections and protocol of choice was UUCP. The network called Usenet, carried email and forums. Sending out an email was based on source-routing. Nowadays, everybody is using @-addresses, but 30 years ago, your business card would include a !-style address, describing your connection-path to a well know UUCP-node, for example mcvax in Amsterdam. Sending out a mail would mean linking your own email path with the destination mail path, to build the entire uucp-path like host1!host2!mcvax!host4!host5. Luckily now we have @-addresses.

While working at university, it was time for SunOS, probably version 3, later in 1989 followed by version 4. At a bank, I developed system software, some of my code used in production for more then 15 years, passing the Y2K barrier.

That was also the period to learn about TCP/IP, first across Thick Ethernet (10BASE5) with its vampire taps.

When joining IBM end of 1990, I’ve moved over to AIX 3.1 which was quickly followed by AIX 3.2., then I went through all the releases till AIX 7.2 today. Still doing some fancy stuff on these systems, that made me several good friends over the years.

In the middle of the 90’s, with the start of the web, I was webmaster for www.ibm.be. In 1995 I started to deploy my first VPN’s across the world, interconnecting company locations using the Internet as backbone. Very good memories of travelling to install firewalls in UK, US, India, China and South Africa.

In 2001, I disclosed my first security vulnerability in AIX CVE-2001-1080 and received acknowledgement for this disclosure in IBM ERS vulnerability report.

While working on a security project on Redhat, I came up with an idea on ‘Computer systems, methods and program product for multi-level communications ‘ for which I received my first patent filing.

Aside of AIX, also touching upon several Linux distributions, from RedHat, CentOS, Ubuntu and my personal preferred Fedora Core for usage @ home, I also became a fanatic user of FreeNAS based on FreeBSD and Raspbian, a Debian which runs on Raspberry Pi.

When looking at the overview of Unix’s, there are still a few Unix versions to explore for me. Computers have changed a lot in 35 years, but I never could have imagined when I first connected in October 1983 to a System III, that my IT journey would be so omnifarious and that I still would be using today line commands such as ‘cd’, ‘ls’ and the screen-oriented editor ‘vi’.

Just wondering what the next 35 years will bring as 'my first.....' .