Ten years ago I bought a used 200MHz Pentium with a 2gig hard drive and 32megs of RAM. A big leap forward from the Mac LC I was using, I bought the Pentium to run Linux. Nothing good enough was appearing cheap at garage sales, so I "splurged" $150 to get the computer. So that's when I started running Linux, a day or two later. I'd known about Unix 20 years before, when it was either unavailable or too expensive, as was the hardware. I ran Microware OS-9 on the Radio Shack Color Computer from 1984 to late 1993, because it was "unix-like". I remember when Dr. Dobbs published Richard Stallman's GNU Manifesto, and that seemed hopeful, yet it took some years after that, and the Linux kernel to come along, to make it viable. By the time Linux had come along, I had stopped buying new computers, so it took some time before I had one good enough. Actually, I tried Linux the summer before on something like a 50MHz 486 8megs of RAM and a 200meg hard drive. It took barely a moment to realize the system was too small, so I splurged.
Running Linux actually meant I could run a graphic browser, I'd only sampled those elsewhere, and even today my main browser remains a text only one. But I had Linux up in time for Fringe 2001, though memory says I did some alternating between the Mac LC (the familiar environment) and Linux that Fringe.
June 2nd was the tenth anniversary of Spencer Tunick coming to town to do a nude photo shoot of a large number of people, I seem to recall at Place des Arts. It wasn't the first time he'd done that sort of thing, but looking back it was relatively early in his career. I was tempted to go, but it happened really early in the morning, and I wasn't up to it. Memory says it wasn't that warm that morning either. Helen was talking about going, if I remember properly, one of the volunteers in 2001 revealed that she had been to the shoot.
