I use Windows 10 on my machines these days. I do remember Windows 8 as I think I had it on something, and I remember Windows 7 from school and I think from some netbook where I had it Starter edition back around middle school. From middle school I remember Vista. I was a user of Windows XP for some time in primary school. I did use Windows 2000 and I spent quite some time using Windows 98, mostly unnetworked.
I main that OS. I did already learn about it some. Although when I joined my company in May and encountered people using it professionally for platform-independent software development, I felt bad when others could do more in it than I could despite still being able to do less than I could in Linux or Unix environments, if not even in Mac OS X, and that even relatively to supposedly broader capabilities.
Powershell has become something I enjoy using
although I had times when I was deeming it unfit and I still am
not entirely out of that. The object-oriented piping is amazing to
me, although how unfit it is for handling simple binary data
through pipes is astonishing to me. I love, however, how neat it
is not only to write cmdlets in .NET but how great the access to
all .NET is in it, allowing me to rewrite lots of stuff into
directly Powershell, only at first writing them in a typed
compiled language for easier bug-spotting but then being able to
rewrite into a .ps1 almost verbatim.
.NET with WinForms are enjoyable to me, I may be biased but this is the first GUI visual designer that felt approachable to me. When I want to write a graphical application, that's my first choice. I may end up doing Mono even.
The favorable encounter with Visual Basic .NET and the graphical designer in Visual Studio have made me very interested in diving into Visual Basic 6.0. I haven't quite did so yet, and installing it on a modern Windows is a pain, but I will be getting down to it.
I am about to dive into practical use of Windows 98 and 2000
machines. I already do use Windows 2000 on a small laptop I keep
in Warsaw because as a 32bit Windows it supports my IrDA USB
adapter very well, allowing me to synchronize my Palm OS
4.1 palmtop without the need to bring a cradle in the
luggage. The palmtop I use for daily organisation purposes, such
as todos management, datebook, and work time tracking. The laptop
also has Haiku OS installed which I was at a time very
passionate about and focusing on, but now it awaits being added to
bootmgr.ini.
But I also own three Dell Latitude CPxH laptops, one of sentimental value with keyboard malfunctioning, one display-less with Track Stick malfunctioning, and one in full working condition. They feature a Pentium III for CPU. I intend to use the display-less one as a print server for my OKI 320 Elite that I purchased out of longing for my two wider ones, OKI 3321 and OKI 321 Elite, in both of which I replaced line feed roller motor assembly back in my high school days due to each missing a tooth on the gear, as well as which will forever await replacement of the mainboard due to having gotten fried by one lenghty Centronics cable. BTW my Optima SP 20 electronic typewriter, purchased in 2020 out of longing for those two, also is in need of a line feed roller gear replacement due to a missing tooth.
I happen to have gotten a Windows Mobile 2003 palmtop recently, after a replacement battery arrives I will see about starting to use it. Updating Odyssey Client should allow me to use WPA2 on it. Can't wait to try out MS ActiveSync.
Not so retrocomputing but I also happen to use a Blackberry Q20 Classic employing Blackberry 10 OS as a phone and email client. Blackberry Hub is real good for zeroing the inbox. It happens to be in ROM version allowing installation of freely sourced apks without the need to repackage them for Blackberry, which is how I am able to install any API ≤16 minSdkVersion apps on it. That turned me to seek ways to not touch any of the more common annoying ways of Android SDK while developing an app, which is how I discovered B4A, or Basic4android, which I am presently diving into intermittently.
I happen to have been privileged to grow up around Linux-powered
computers. Bash was just a basic way to use a
computer for me, hence I possessed some absolutely most basic shell
scripting skills from early age. So was having installation
media of Ubuntu very much at hand. And so was employing XDMCP to
log in with X Windows from one machine to another remotely. Buying
myself a Raspberry Pi and setting up RRDtool on it was
naturally consequent to that. Later sometime in high school I
ended up diving into NixOS and OpenBSD, which
made me later linger around tcsh and cwm,
besides other, tiling, window managers.
Having a webpage was also a thing I was introduced to early, hence the very much established practice of having one that's in me. I however avoid doing too much HTML by hand these days, as I turned to seek rapidity above anything else, choosing to use Seamonkey Composer for personal webmastering these days. In tune with the retro vibe, I practice HTML4 and CSS 2.1.
But I had always been wanting to do some actual programming beyond what I thought was to be accomplished with Bash scripting. Dad has been handing me K&R ANSI C 2nd Ed. since I was 10 y. o., but I had never passed beyond the first chapters, doing tasks one by one. In the last year of middle school I started aiming to get started with something soon and I thus took to get a good grasp of Git version control for the source code I would be writing and putting online. Then on one night as I was finishing middle school I sat down to Python and ended up writing mixed Bash & Python contraptions for some purposes.
The Python fascination and participation in Toruń Festival of
Arts and Science programming showcase highschoolers' projects
started first by my colleagues then by myself brought me a
recommendation for a twice summer job in a machine learning
startup, where I ended up being most useful in writing shell
script contraptions for automatizing LTSP netboot
fat-client terminal deployments and UCarp
Ethernet band bonding configuration and MongoDB replication
setup automation, as well as dockerizing services, and
writing Dockerfiles in general along with docker-compose
(with a dash in the name at the time). I also had a lick of Ruby
there in Vagrant configurations that were employed in
heavy use of VirtualBox for testing netboot stuff,
besides having a 2U server on my desk in the startup's office.
They also made me read a thick book about Scrum (an Agile
mathodologies framework). And there was some Redis scripting
too.
But at the time of having been hired for my first summer job my
fascinations were already somewhere else, with the programming
language Go vel Golang. It ended up
being the language I had my only ever successfully led team in a
hobby project to work together on code. Subsequent fascination
with Clojure did make me move that project onto it,
however not so with most of my team. Clojure did however get me
into a one more summer job for a fellow JUG member. And was a
gateway into Spacemacs (in evil mode) and consequently Emacs.
In hopes of engaging one of the members of my project and also
desperately seeking further advanced language constructs I turned
to Haskell, which just made me be even more alone in the
project, but I did enjoy the language truly, despite not getting a
nearly far enough grasp of its ways. I then tried to take a
last-minute turn of the project into first a Dart
implementation and subsequently my first lick of Java and
there were sparks but it ultimately never got back to life; but it
was some practical experience after already months of
participating in Toruń Java Users Group. Besides having
had decided to write my matura high school exam in Java and MySQL.
And then I emigrated to a nearby bigger city at an opportunity,
hoping to find more Haskellers in the larger university. I ended
up indulging in reading about language design of ALGOL 68
while there.
Twitter, once the space where I was learning all the stuff about Scala and Rust and OCaml and more. I was no longer practising anything, but I was reading a lot of short excerpts about everything. Where I discovered initiatives and people and technologies, countless to the point of not being able to list them. Since this section has so little text, maybe shall I mention that I also turned to be a fun of LaTeX at the time, even back in high school already? Although well, I have long been looking up to hopes of learning troff/nroff.
And those circles I got in, in the long run, placed me in one of the most important circles of friends I'm in these days, and which contributes the most to my development, especially inspiring the retrocomputing re-fascination and new fascinations in it. But what had to follow first was roughly three years of a crisis forsaking education and professional activity. And just toying with stuff like dependently-typed programming languages or like Common Lisp, or getting inspired by one once-friend to get started with APL.
A friend (an FP, actually) in middle school who inspired me into Python was also influential with helping me have a Hackintosh. I also ended up maining a Power Mac G5, that I got from an acquiantance/ dad's friend&colleague, for quite some time with great enjoyment.
I am jovial when I can mention OpenWebStart, okay? My work (a
first big job) has me write shell scripts and do some very
enterprise IBM beans. No we don't utilize OpenWebStart, AFAIK.
The crisis led me to pursue an archivist technician qualification. Almost a year of it made me quite passionate about some concepts I learned from it.
I am passionate about managing paper documents, and about stationery and handwriting. I love to purchase old fountain pens or restore cheap popular old ones.
I also like slide rules, as in the logarithmic ones, a lot. I used to know more about ways of computing on them.
And graphical calculators, especially the HP RPN ones, especially employing a Computer Algebra System, so HP 49g+ that I own and is virtually identical to HP 50g. I also hope to make a serial cable for my TI-83+ hopefully not long from now, despite no longer using it.
I used to aspire to become an Esperantist. I used to be sometimes passionate about translating lyrically song lyrics from Polish to French. I am intermittently an avid Duolingo user, having long attempted studying Chinese, Romanian, Ukrainian.. I know Cyryllic script since childhood and can usually handle reading Russian or Ukrainian.
I am passionate about etymologies and am thus on a
basic level knowledgeable in Latin and Greek roots of
words, as well as somewhat Germanic and French too, but
as primarily focusing on Polish, also Slavic including Eastern
influences.