Progress

Back in the old days, (1990s) I had ISDN at home. It was the fastest bandwidth available, and it afforded me voice and fax and data all in one interface. (ISDN-BRI, with two B channels and one D channel for signalling, if you get technical.) Billing was awful. I paid two cents a minute per B channel during peak hours, and it took some tweaking to get it down. (Windows really does broadcast every eleven minutes, and that would bring up the data at two cents a minute.) Needless to say, I stayed up late at night to do large downloads.

I have gone through DSL and now I have cable at about 5 Megabits per second. I just downloaded Fedora Core 4 (Redhat's free testbed) and installed it on an old P3 system I have here. Federal Core 4 is 4 CDs, about 650 MB each. I had some trouble with the media checking, and the SHA-1 checks didn't check out, so I had to download them all again.

All in all, I think I downloaded over 5 GB of data over the past 24 hours. Back in 1998, this would have been unthinkable. Back then, you had to order the CDs, wait for them to arrive, and then install it. And installing Redhat 5.x, you had to know the IRQs and DMAs and which chip set your NIC had (I started hoarding DEC Tulip cards). Today, Redhat (and the other Linuxes) load up all my hardware automatically. I don't have to know anything about my hardware.

And the new linuxes have nice GUIs that launch by default. To log in at runlevel 3, you need to start tweak inittab. And VI has now been replaced with VIM.

All I wanted was a command line interface like I'm used to.