Adrian Chadd, known for his extensive WiFi work and research in FreeBSD, recounts his humble beginnings of FreeBSD from youth — starting with meeting Julian Elischer.
Original: http://adrianchadd.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-importance-of-mentoring-or-how-i.html
Here’s how I was introduced into this UNIX world, or “wait, WHO was your WHAT?”
So, here’s 11ish or so year old Adrian. It’s the early 90s. I was hiding in my bedroom, trying to make another crystal set out of random parts and scraping away the paint at my windowsill. In walks my Aunty, who introduces her new boyfriend.
“Hi, I’m Julian.” he said. That wasn’t all that interesting.
“Oh, are you making a crystal set?” .. ok, so that was interesting.
And, that was that. Suddenly, someone role-model-y shows up in my life out of the blue. There I was, an 11 year old who felt very mostly alone most of the time, and someone shows up who I can look up to and think I can relate to. So, I’m a sponge for everything he shows me. Whenever he comes over, he has some new story to tell, some new thing to show me. He would show me better ways of building transistor switch circuits when I was in the “make large arcs with car alternator” phase of my early teens. And, when I saved up and bought a PC, he started to show me programming.
Now, I was already programming. My parents had saved up and bought me an Amstrad CPC464. We had a second-hand commodore 64 for a short while, but that eventually somehow stopped working and I didn’t have the clue to fix it. But I was programming Locomotive BASIC and dabbling in Z80 assembly when I was 12, and had “upgraded” to Turbo Pascal 6 when I hit high school. (Yes, school taught Turbo Pascal at Grade 10 level, and I decided to learn it a bit earlier. That’s .. wow, that dates me.) I hadn’t yet really stumbled into C yet. I had heard about it, but I didn’t have anything that could write it.
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