[Discussion] What do you wish you had known years ago?

[Trihexagonal]

What I could do with a Tandy TRS-80 I saw for sale at RadioShack in 1977.

That was a lot of money for the Missouri State Mental Health Dept position I held back then, which only paid once a month, and budding geek that I was, didn't know what I would do with it if I did make the purchase.


It was 1993 when I started a job as a weekend house parent at a Group Home in Illinois (where I was not recognized as a QMRP) at 2pm on a Friday afternoon when the Q handed me a floppy disk, pointed at an Apple II and said "This goes in there", like good luck with that.


I would rather have died on the spot than let her know I had never touched a computer in my life, but by 9am Monday morning due to my familiaiaty with menu from playing video games there wasn't anything I didn't know about that computer, no floppy disk in the building I hadn't looked through and no file contained therein I hadn't run off a copy of if I so desired.

When they upgraded to a newer model they sent me to pick it up, set it up and had to show them all how to boot it up by flipping he floppy during the boot process because I was the ony one that had RTFM.

[bin]

Look after your knees and your back!

[ann_droid]

Hi

Mainly this is about the "RTFM" culture that used to surround the mid to late1990's, especially with hardened vets, and how the intolerance has pervaded to newcomers still.

Yeah Debian in the late 90's was unwelcoming, and I hoped it would now be more enlightened, but sadly not.

So I guess this is about learning not to hope for better in the future, because I naively did back then.

[donald]

Look after your knees and your back!

This is probably the most relevant piece of advice written online.

Hi

Mainly this is about the "RTFM" culture that used to surround the mid to late1990's, especially with hardened vets, and how the intolerance has pervaded to newcomers still.

Yeah Debian in the late 90's was unwelcoming, and I hoped it would now be more enlightened, but sadly not.

So I guess this is about learning not to hope for better in the future, because I naively did back then.

Far before my time in Debian, but Debian and a few other distros were exactly like that, if you thought Linux was bad then you clearly never talked to a UNIX, Novell, or a VAX admin. They all had the same answer for a documentation request: Read the code.

Most software companies and distributions have gotten much much better.