CFWhitman

I know for things like this they often use body length as the comparator. That is, instead of stride length, they might use the ratio of the average height of a person to distance run in a marathon compared to the ratio of average length of the hamster to distance run. Of course for an animal with a significant tail, the tail would not be included, but hamsters don't really have a significant tail.

I was interested in computers from a young age and had a Timex/Sinclair 1000 with 16K of RAM as the first computer I actually owned. I used MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 before I went back to school for a CIS degree. It was then, in 1997 that I first heard of Linux. I was introduced via Slackware and Red Hat. Then when I left school and got a technical job I acquired Mandrake 6 which I used at home and put Debian 2.2 on an old machine I scrounged out of old parts at work.

Unlike you my experience with Linux was more positive at the outset. My use as school was mostly remote from a command line, and it didn't seem that foreign to my previous experience with computers. Then when I put it on computers I had afterward, Mandrake was friendly and Debian was very stable. I also used Slackware quite a bit. It was some work to get X11 going on Debian or Slackware, but didn't seem too difficult.

I found at work that the parallel port CD writer I had to burn CD's for people (the only CD writer we had at first) would only burn one CD on my NT Workstation (a Pentium III 500) before requiring a reboot or everything after would be a coaster. Also, even the first burn wouldn't work if you tried to use the computer while the write was going on (this was typical of Windows machines in those days). On the other hand the Debian machine I had scrounged (a Pentium 233) would burn discs reliably time after time even if I browsed the Internet with Mozilla while the burn was going on.

I found myself using Linux more and more on any dual boot machines I had right from the outset. It wasn't that long before I kept Windows around only for games. I actually still have a Windows install as a secondary boot on a machine at home, mostly so my brother can play certain games. I almost never have a reason to boot into that. At work Windows has been relegated to a virtual machine, though I still need to use it a significant amount (though not the majority of the time).