Although I've been around people into Unix and Linux for 17 or so years, I am only now moving to Linux (Maya Cinnamon).

I started working with computers in 1973 (IBM 360/370) as a real-time Assembler Language programmer in the Program Airlines Reservation system (PARS) as modified for the financial industry.

Back then PARS polled 'dumb' terminals situated across the country with polling times to each terminal on the order of 3 seconds, and it did that with 256k of main memory (iron rings, each functioning as one bit, threaded with copper (gold?) wires). The *big* machine at the company (there were two mainframes, one for testing and backup for the online mainframe) had 512k main memory.

Heady days! :)

In 1983 for a period of approximately 1 1/2 years, did some heavy development in systems and applications on a "micro computer" under the Flex OS on the Motorola 6809. 

I was amazed at how powerful that chip, and its successor the Motorola 68000, was. The architechure of the 68000  is (and was then) every bit as powerful as the IBM 370 architechure (a mainframe that took up half a building), and it did it in a box that could sit on a desktop.

Until recently I have, amongst other things, been a programmer (Foxpro, an xBase dialect DB developer), sysadmin, network and hardware tech. in the Intel/Windows environment.

I've recently more or less retired and am now moving into the Linux world for my personal systems.

Very nice stuff.