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Chapter 150: Lus?Linus!

Vina was very happy that her son had found a dance partner, especially that the other party was still Joanna, so she had a very hearty dinner in the evening, and even opened champagne to celebrate, of course, only she and Orlando were drinking, Arthur and Lin Hong could only drink, they were not old enough to drink. Pen, fun, and www.biquge.info

Although Lin Hong and Arthur are eager to taste alcohol, this behavior will obviously not be approved by Vina and Orlando, because in the United States, minors under the age of 18 are prohibited from using alcoholic beverages, which is illegal. Not only do teenagers break the law, but those who serve them alcoholic beverages are also held accountable.

Is it also illegal to drink alcohol in your own home? Lin Hong felt a little strange about this, once he and Sun Wu secretly drank Master's liquor together.

Arthur explained the law to Lin Hong and told him a joke about it.

It is said that there was a young man who robbed the store, snatched all the money from the cash register, and when he finally left, he took a bottle of wine from the shelf, and at this time the boss who had been staying in the corner and obeying suddenly became anxious, saying that I have no opinion on taking the money, but the store definitely does not sell tobacco and alcohol to minors, and the young robber directly took out his social security card and showed it to the boss, so as to prove that he had turned 18 years old. Later, the police arrested the robber based on this clue.

Although it is a joke, it also shows how seriously the American people take this law, and if a minor violates this law, it is likely to be punished by community labor or the study of the law on drinking.

After dinner, Lin Hong chatted with Vina and them for a while, and then returned to his room.

Turn on the phone and dial up to connect to the network.

"Huh? Got a new email? ”

Lin Hong's eyes suddenly lit up, and he remembered that he had sent an email to Lus yesterday.

He immediately opened it and saw that it was Lus's reply.

"Hello, old friend, it's a pleasure to hear from you. It seems that you are doing well in the United States, so quickly connected to the Internet and sent me your first email, you know, a month ago, you didn't even know what an email was......"

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Linus is currently a sophomore at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

A few years ago, he could no longer stand the age of his sinclair_ql and the fact that his operating system could not be freely programmed, so he made an important decision to sell it and gradually save up for a new computer.

But this SCQL computer is too niche, whether in high school or college, he has never seen anyone use this kind of machine, everyone uses those PCs more, but for him who has already played 68020, he is really not interested in the kind of PC that functions like a toy.

This situation lasted until the end of last year, when he found that with the popularity of 386CPU chips, PCs can do everything that can be done on the 68020, and more importantly, PCs are cheaper than the 68020.

Of course, there is another important reason why he wants to change to a new machine, that is, one of the courses in this year's computer course is called "Unix Operating System", although this course has not yet started, but he is looking forward to it. To this end, he went to the bookstore in advance to buy a textbook called "Operating System: Design and Execution".

It took Linus about a month to read through the 719-page tome, in which the author Andrew mainly introduced an operating system called "minix", which is a condensed version of Unix that he wrote specifically for classes, it is very small, and many functions are emasculated, but it is indeed a first-class operating system, which can successfully run in computers.

This book has had a great impact on Linus, and everyone has a book in their life that will affect their life, and for Linus, this book is "Operating Systems: Design and Execution".

Through this book, Linus learned about the concept behind Unix and what that powerful, neat, and beautiful operating system could do, so he decided to buy a machine to operate Unix, of course, he couldn't get the full version of Unix, he planned to run Minix on the machine, and this version he could mail order directly from Professor Andrew in the Netherlands.

The SCQL computer in Linus' hand was still functioning, and he felt that it was a bit of a waste to just retire it and put it in the warehouse, so he thought about selling it to scrape together some money for his next computer. The problem was that his computer was so niche that no one was interested in his computer at all, and then he had to spend some money and put an ad in a computer magazine.

After waiting for a while, a man named Choko finally came to him on a confident car, because he also had a SCQL computer, and he thought he was the only one in Finland who used this brand of computer, so after seeing this advertisement, he came. On the one hand, he wanted to make a friend, and on the other hand, he also wanted to buy some accessories from Linus, after all, Linus accessories were relatively good, and he worked hard to order them from the UK.

Linus and Choco became friends, and his accessories were almost half sold and half given to Jocco. His savings plan failed to materialize a year ago, because a 386 PC was too expensive, and although the price had been greatly reduced, it would require at least 18,000 Finnish marks, which is about $3,500 when converted into dollars. That's a lot of money for him.

At this time, the "UNIX operating system" course had already started, but fortunately, the University of Helsinki imported a micro VAX host from abroad last fall, using the operating system of Ultix, which is one of the many versions of UNIX. This is a multi-user operating system, which allows many people to use the "terminal" to log in to the host at the same time to operate, and the user does not feel that other people are also using the computer at the same time, and in the user's opinion, he seems to be operating a computer that stands upright.

The terminal is not a computer, but a device specially produced for the multi-user host, this kind of equipment usually only has a monitor and a keyboard, that is, an output device and an input device, which is connected to the host through a cable, and the host is operated through remote login, and all operations and operations are carried out on the remote host.

In the beginning, Linus was learning Unix on terminals, but due to the limited number of places, only sixteen terminals could be connected at a time, and there were thirty-two students who took this course, so the instructor had to divide the students into two groups, one for the machine during the day and the other for the night.

This was obviously inconvenient, and at this time Linus dreamed of having his own PC, running Unix on this machine, so that he could freely operate it at any time.

The New Year's bell rang, and after Christmas, Linus celebrated his twenty-first birthday, and at this time, he finally made up his mind to get his third computer anyway.

At this time, he only had 6,000 Finnish marks in his hands, which was all the money he could raise after the two important holidays of "Christmas" and "Birthday", although it was not enough to pay for the tall 18,000 Finnish marks of the computer, but there was a way for him to get the machine, and that was to pay in installments. He can pay one-third of the amount upfront and the rest within three years.

So, Linus came to the computer store with a huge sum of 6000 Finnish marks, ordered a PC from the owner, there is no brand, he doesn't care about this, as long as it is 386, the memory should be at least 4M, and the CPU should be at least 33MHz...... Linus provided his needs to the shopkeeper, who then asked him to come and pick up the goods in three days, when they would assemble the computer.

After three long days, Linus and his father finally moved their third computer back. The gray case, which is unsightly and miscellaneous, has a 14-inch display.

The standard operating system of this computer is DOS developed by Microsoft, but Linus didn't like it, and he wanted to install miniX on it so that he could practice some of the operating system he had learned on it.

So, he picked up the phone and ordered a minix for a total of $169, and the system would arrive in Finland a month later.

He felt very helpless about this, but there was no way, this was the only way he could get a copy of the minix.

So, after a long month of waiting, he finally received the goods. He used a total of sixteen floppy disks before finally fitting the operating system into his 386 computer. It took him several more days to get Minix to get used to it, and he was a little disappointed because the operating system was so simple that the author had removed most of Unix's features, leaving only a few simple features to demonstrate, such as a simple file system and memory management mechanism.

So, Linus began to rebuild the minix, and he was pleased that the computer was completely under his control, and he even had a copy of the source code of the operating system, and he could clearly know all the operating mechanisms in it if he wanted to. So, he gradually started porting the software he had written from his previous computer to this machine.

It took him about a month before he was finally satisfied with his minix and was able to meet some of his daily operations. But he knows that this is far from enough, compared to Unix, the minix in his hand is more like a toy, usually, he still uses the school terminal for Unix learning and Internet surfing.

So, he started another project, writing a "terminal simulation software" for his minix, using software to simulate the terminal, so that he can connect to the university console at home.

It was at this time that Linus received an email from his ham friend Stone.

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