John helped get me and my college roommate started with Linux system administration and web development three decades ago. We both grew up in in the town in Iowa where John lived, and my roommate had met him around the time we went to college in the mid nineties. We were both nerdy engineering majors who had gotten exposed to Unix through our college dial-up shell accounts, and we had managed to scavenge together enough computer parts — an old 386 motherboard, a discarded hard drive that just needed a molex connector soldered back onto it, a spare floppy drive — to assemble a computer just barely capable of running Linux.
I remember lugging it all over to John’s basement where he helped us install Slackware Linux from a giant stack of 5 1/4 floppies he had.
Later, when John was running up a dial-up ISP in town, he let us park that server at his ISP, so we had a full Linux server of our own connected to a T1 with its own public IP address, and where we had root access and could experiment with running our own web and email servers and other such things. Back then in dial-up days, having a Linux server of our own on the Internet seemed unbelievable, and I will always be deeply appreciative to John for that opportunity.
I remember lugging it all over to John’s basement where he helped us install Slackware Linux from a giant stack of 5 1/4 floppies he had.
Later, when John was running up a dial-up ISP in town, he let us park that server at his ISP, so we had a full Linux server of our own connected to a T1 with its own public IP address, and where we had root access and could experiment with running our own web and email servers and other such things. Back then in dial-up days, having a Linux server of our own on the Internet seemed unbelievable, and I will always be deeply appreciative to John for that opportunity.