Submitted February 5, 2003, 3:44 AM
Tell your story of how you got started using or developing free or open source software:
I think my first exposure to open source was in the era of 8080 and Z-80 machines. If I recall correctly, this was around 1979. I was working with an open source BASIC interpreter, written in assembler of course. It was essential that it be open source, since I was modifying it extensively to use a hardware floating point card (in an S-100 bus, for those who remember that). I was amazed that a) someone had written something of that magnitude and made the source available, and b) that it was exactly what I needed to enable what I was doing.
Since then I have contributed my own open source, first on Compuserve, then on Simtel, after that on various other ftp sites before "http" meant anything, and of course now on the web. It started with various MSDOS command line utilities, a port of uuencode/uudecode to MSDOS, a random number generator library for Turbo C, and software to read HP calculator infrared output using a cheap Radio Shack IR receiver. I just searched on Google and actually found some of that ancient stuff from the 80's still out there! I converted to Unix around 1989 and wrote the open source InfoZIP zip and decompression for unzip, the latter of which I adapted for use in gzip which I co-authored with Jean-loup Gailly. I was involved in the effort to develop the PNG graphics standard around 1995, and at that time wrote with Jean-loup the zlib compression library. I continue to support zlib today.
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