Just a tip for something that has helped me from getting a heart-attack over the many years of online discourse....

 

Back in the day (ugh-really?) there were only TWO rules for participation in the store-and-forward Fidonet system:

 

1) Thou shalt not excessively annoy others.

2) Thou shalt not be too easily annoyed.

 

Breaking *either* rule, got you kicked out.   Strangely enough, rule #2 was broken more often than #1.   And it helps you grow a skin, no matter what is said.  Most importantly, it keeps you hacking, and not getting a heart-attack.

 

For Devs, maybe the OpenBSD philosophy can cut through some of the angst:

1) Here's what we're doing.  Hope you like it.

2) Shut up and hack.

 

Dunno - been through many Usenet and Fidonet flame-wars.  Not worth it.  DEC vs IBM vs Sun hardware yadda yadda.  Binary only distributions (talk about blobs!), with per-seat / per-cpu, and "bundled" apart so that you don't even get a compiler, (and your department won't pay for licensing - hence the glee over GCC) - don't want to break open the Unix-wars again...

 

The point is, these "disposable" SBC's aren't worth getting a heart attack about.  Do what you love, but unless you are actually part of making your OWN board, don't get a heart-attack over it.  Or over clueless users like me.  Or devs that shouldn't even be reading this!

 

Edited March 26, 20197 yr by PDP11
Official Fidonet rules changed to original wording.

You had me at Fidonet.  I was a SysOp in the final days of BBS era.

 

Although i probably only sent 1 message on fidonet tops

I was too - but those two rules above have stuck with me all these years and served me well in the future..

 

Ah, good times.  The first time your system actually doesn't crash during zone mail hour.  Tossing mail.  Pulling in echoes.  9600 bp$ modems.  DESQview.  Mailreaders and pointmail.  Dedicated phone line(s).  It was expensive to be dedicated to it - compared to today.

 

Heh, anyone balking at the price of an SBC or computer gear of today might want to flip through some of the online BYTE or other mags of the day to get an idea of what bang-for-the-buck meant back then!

 

Graduated from that to commercial unix shell-account running slrn to get real access to newsgroups .. the Fidonet philosophy saved me from a heart-attack there too.

 

I used os/2 warp for multitasking, but serial io was like 200bps slower even with some add-on serial drivers and ultimately switch to tried and true desqview.

 

Our first isp back home was a dialup SCO Unix shell.  I remember when they announced adding a new disk for their usenet storage.

 

Speaking of which.. ive searched high and low for a NNTP gateway thats compatible with this forum software, but no luck.

Oh yeah - I cut my teeth on vi with a 2-seat version unbundled version of Xenix.  Thought the code was bad / monitor broken when I saw all the tildes on the left side of the screen.  Then ftp'ed a whole box of floppies to try Slackware.  Same thing!

 

Thought it was nuts to run a unix workstation just to use kermit to access a shell .... so with the same excitement of getting my zone mail hour dos batch file not to crash with all the related components, I almost cried when I *finally* got my sendmail config to work on the slack box!

 

Little ot:  no disrepect to the OpenBSD guys with what appears to be a cold philosophy of shut-up-and-hack.  It actually is meant to be a brutally efficient *time saver* for both devs and users (consult our docs first).  So it's not a social-club - but that doesn't mean that personal interaction is full of problems.  I see a similar vibe here with Armbian.  Just a warning for lurkers, or rpi'ers who may see some unsavory comments - just grow some skin, and your new arm board will be just as much fun.

 

Like this little song about it:

http://www.openbsd.org/songs/songsh.ogg

 

Being hard core doesn't mean you can't have fun with it.

 

 

That song exceeded expectations.