The Green Dragon ran on DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 when I first started using it. In 1997 I upgraded to Windows 3.11. Most people in the company were running Windows 95 at the time. I refused to switch from to an operating system I considered an unnecessary benefits for instability. Although Windows 3.11 had it's quirks, it was easy to learn what not to do and easy to tell then things were becomming unstable. And DOS, to me, was always a superior operating system because it let the programmer do whatever they wanted. My computer was well known for it's multi-menu config.sys startup and 1 MB batch file directory. While working at Electro Cam, the engineers and I had put together a computer we called "Engineering Storage". Basically, we were tired of getting yelled at by the network administrator for using too much space on the company's primary network server. We were notorious for keeping every last peace of data we encountered; downloads, news group posts, PDF data sheets, backups of projects in various states and anything else we didn't want on our local drive but didn't really want to delete. To address this problem, the other engineers and I put together "EngStor" or "Engineering Storage". It was outfitted with a 10 GB hard drive in Pentium 166 system I saved from the dumpster. The 10 GB drive quickly filled up and we engineers went in independently on our own drives to add. I added a 30 and someone else added a 20 GB for a total of an unheard of 70 GB of storage. We dwarfed the total network capacity of a mear 22 GB (but then, the network was a RAID-5 SCSI array). A collective of MP3s began, and everyone who was willing to bring in CDs quickly had them added to the collection. In it's peek, we had over 5,000 MP3s from hundreds of artists. Engineering storage became a massive company jukebox. Tragically, my 30 GB hard drive died, taking with it half of our MP3 collection and an unknown amount of miscellaneous data I don't think anyone really ended up missing. The drive was replaced free of charge as it was still under warrantee, but sadly, the data was gone forever. I left Electro Cam Corp. in August of 2001. Despite the death of my hard drive, Engineering Storage was still very useful both as a jukebox and it's original intention, miscellaneous storage. Rather than mess up what was a working system everyone liked as it was, I was offered a trade: Engineering Storage for my old workstation. Both systems were nearly identical specification wise, and both out-of-date. With my workstation having served me so well, I knew it was a very fair trade. And so, the Green Dragon became the Green Dragon. Today, the Green Dragon runs SuSE linux and is primarily used for experimentation. In the future, I hope to use SuSE linux for anything I can including being a web and mail server, but at present, I do not understand linux enough. However, once I get some basic functions working, such as networking with windows based machines and a fully configured web server, SuSE will turn into the primary operating system of the White Dragon. The Green Dragon is part of this learning and converting process. UPDATE: Since that writing, the I've learned how to use SuSE Linux and the White Dragon has been runny quite happily for many months. The Green Dragon now serves as an experimental Linux server, where I try things that would scare me on the White Dragon (can't risk interrupting the server). The Green Dragon is much slower then the White, but it's interesting to seeing the 150 MHz computer taking on the same tasks as the 850 MHz White Dragon. It might take a lot longer, but the system doesn't miss a beat. |
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