[talk] I can’t believe it’s been 19 years !

[Isaac (.ike) Levy]

As usual, I'm a little late to the thread-

And after 19 years, BSD UNIX is *still* apparently dead,

> On Jan 20, 2023, at 11:31 AM, George Rosamond <george at ceetonetechnology.com> wrote:
> 
> On 1/20/23 00:32, Jesse Callaway wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 3:34 PM Mark Saad <nonesuch at longcount.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> All
>>>  George reminded me it’s been 19 years of nyc bug !
>>> https://www.nycbug.org/index?action=view&id=00022 . Anyone want to share
>>> a story about their first meeting.
>>> 
>>> The first meeting I went to was with FreeBSD with zfs Ike and yarema. It
>>> was good to meet other people as crazy as me to run zfs in production.
>>> 
>>> ---
>>> Mark Saad | nonesuch at longcount.org
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> talk mailing list
>>> talk at lists.nycbug.org
>>> https://lists.nycbug.org:8443/mailman/listinfo/talk
>> 
>> 
>>> I forget what office building it was, maybe PWC, we had standing room only
>> in a small conference room. The presentation was about encrypting a whole
>> disk. The presenter had his laptop secured this way and we were all quite
>> impressed, but I had doubts that it was practical for daily use.
> 
> Rolland on cgd...
> 
> https://www.nycbug.org/index?action=view&id=00020

I just saw the page says:
"Ike is in the process of getting the video online"

I certainly remember this meeting, but I do not remember making a video of this meeting.

> There was something about that meeting that I wish we could do more of...
> 
> Presentation + white paper.
> 
> We have tried to bridge the research/academia to the practical a few
> times, and it was worthwhile.

Agreed- a fellowship of practictioner and academic perspectives, raising glasses.

--
My First NYC*BUG meeting?

Winter 2003(?) I remember I had just met my first other BSD person in real life- George, at the final NYC Linuxworld expo.  (I went just to ask Eric S Raymond to sign my copy of his book.)

So to me, the first NYC*BUG meeting, wasn't a NYC*BUG meeting at all- it was a collection of all the wild/diverse Linux/UNIX user groups that existed in NYC at the time.  It was this thing George and some others had corralled together in the vaccum of LinuxWorld moving to Boston.

User goups came togehter to form a sort of "Open Source Council", and IT WAS QUITE THE HOT MESS of a meeting.  A dozen user groups that couldn't agree on *anything*, all with comparable expressive ability to snipe at each other.  Not even a basic name to refer to what we were doing could be agreed on, nobody could agree on using the words "free" or "open".  I remember vicious debate about these words, some yelling even.
I went to that meeting representing LESMUUG, (Lower East Side Mac UNIX Users Group), and I remember someone from the "GNU-bees" who would not even shake my hand because "That's not free software". In retrospect, it was an amazing experience.  After 2 or 3 omore of these meetings, this fizzled out...

A few folks left there resolved to just go focus on the BSD thing, and I guess my first *real* NYC*BUG meeting was also my first real introduction to OpenBSD,
https://www.nycbug.org/index?action=view&id=00021

--
I remember thinking to myself back then, "Wow, real BSD people operate at a level of rigor I'll never be able to keep up with".
NYC*BUG changed all of that for me by making an environment where everyone got to see how *all* the sausage was made.  A group where deep respect for dumb questions or wacky ideas never supplanted rigor.  Just because someone didn't know how to mount an ms-dos formatted usb stick on any *NIX, didn't mean they may not have deep knowledge to share of relevant TCP stack kernel internals.  Or, vice-versa.

Somewhere in there, NYC*BUG holiday parties became the best fulfillment of that original "Open Source Groups Council" intent- (while organizing the holiday parties nearly killed everyone involved).

In this sort of enviornment, it wasn't long before I found myself being pushed to present and share, and somewhere in the last 20 years, we all became one of these "BSD people" without ever realizing how or when or even why.

And with that, BSD appears more alive than ever :)

Best,
.ike