hpr4666 :: How I got into tech
Lennart describes the computers he used, what he ran on them and what he liked about them.
Hosted by Lennart Benschop on Monday, 2026-06-22 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
BASIC, FORTH, Linux.
(Be the first).
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How I got into tech.
Started by monsterb, this series invites people to share with us how they found Linux. It has become traditional for first time hosts to share with us their journey to Linux. Indeed it has morphed to be way to share your journey in tech right up to your first contribution to HPR.
I started out with Basic on the TI-99/4A in 1984. The bare machine could not be programmed by the user in machine code. In 1985 I bought a ZX Spectrum, that gave me total control over the machine.
I wrote two FORTH systems on the ZX-Spectrum.
In 1988 I got my first 8088 PC, also programming it in FORTH.
In 1992 I got an 80386 PC and I ran Linux on it. MCC Interim Release from v. This was the first Linux distro.
I have been using Linux ever since.
From then on I obtained newer PCs, such as a Pentium in 1995, a Pentium-2 in 1998, a Pentium-4 in 2003 and a Core-2 Duo in 2006.
I used several Linux distributions: but I always return to Debian.
Links:
- https://github.com/ForthHub/F83 F83.COM is the ready to run FORTH system.
- https://github.com/uho/F-PC F-PC - a Forth system optimized for IBM-PC, XT and AT machines running DOS
- https://www.latte.org/latte.htmlLatte The Language for Transforming Text
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe's_Own_Editor
- https://www.freebsd.org/
- https://www.debian.org/
- https://www.gentoo.org/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Mini
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Bridge_(microarchitecture)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)
- https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/
- https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/series/217838/12th-generation-intel-core-i5-processors.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_11