Xaine's Digital Domain

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A little histroy on my adventures into this computer world.


It all starts in 1985 when my family bought an apple-compatible, Cubic99, 
from a local (now very well known) maker, Creative.  Cubic99 was then a 
big wonder as it was the first "talking" computer, it also boast of telephony
capabilities (known as modem).  Hooking it up to a telephone point and there 
I go dialing into local exchanges / boards.

Time went by playing with Bulletin Boards that I decided to startup my own.
Equip with only 486DX2-66, 8Mb Ram, 500Mb Harddisk, and a 14.4kbps modem,
the board got on the way in 1993 under the name Specialist.  Dedication,
hardwork and countless late nights spent in keeping the up and running of
the board.  Services like file-exchange, Door-games and mails were the likes
of all board users.  As time goes by, more financial effort was put in to 
upgrade the capacity of the board :-(

Started of on a DOS platform, the board was eventiually migrated to IBM OS/2
Warp 3 due to the multitasking ability.

Being a hardcore DOS shell user at that time, alot of shell scripting was 
shaped to improve the performance of the board. 

Datal info have been masked out ;-P 

The idea of local area network only came about when I had a chance to lay my
hands on Novell Netware, a 2-user licence package.  Since Netware as able to
run on DOS, the setting up was not a difficult task.  After that sets in the
management of the NLMs. 

Having to start to use UNIX in my Polytechnic days makes me realise the power
it has to unleash in core operating system.  The terms of multi-thread, multi-
user, multi-"everything" created a new dimension of my view in operating 
systems.  Exploration makes me download Linux distro (Debian) over a 36.6kbps
wire over several sessions.  Having know nuts about setting up and configuring
the kernel, it took myself a couple of weeks to actually get it up and running.

As time goes by, searching for the roots of UNIX came about the picture.
BSD was seen as a stable lead after many years of development.  FreeBSD and
OpenBSD then came into my grasp.  Now a converted BSDer, the background
on my Laptop still persist a big Beastie splash ;-)

So the story still goes on .........