Welcome to Bruno's toys Discussions!

[pfuntner]

👋 Welcome!

I'm using Discussions as a place to connect with other members of the community.

I just saw the Discussions tab in another repo today and thought I would see if it was available for mine and it was!

I hope that you:

• Ask questions you’re wondering about.
• Share ideas... do you have ideas for any of the existing tools? New tools?
• Engage with other community members.
• Welcome others and are open-minded. Remember that this is a community we build together 💪.

To get started, comment below with an introduction of yourself and tell us about what you do with this community.

[pfuntner]

I'll kick off an introduction but I don't know if anyone else will ever read it, not to mention post their introduction!

I'm John (aka Bruno) and have been a software engineer since 1984. Check where I've worked in my LinkedIn profile.

Love of Unix

Unix/Linux is kind of near and dear to me as an end user. I still remember my first exposure which was not good. I was taking a C++ class, had typed in my first program on some Unix system (I think I had some cheatsheet to help me with vi) and had called my source file foo.c instead of foo.cpp. So I fumbled around trying to find a rename command. I finally find a command called rm and I thought that must be it!. Imagine my grief when I figured out it removed my file.

It wasn't too long after that when I started a long role as a tester for a group that was putting Unix services on MVS (aka OS/390, Z/390). I had never been a tester before and I was afraid I wouldn't be writing much code. My future manager assured me that he figured we would be writing more than the developers and I think he may have been right! There were some real growing pains with the project... we eventually started with MKS's korn shell as the base for the shell but a lot of basic Unix services had to be created first - there was a C compiler but it just had an ANSI library (fopen(), printf(), etc) and no POSIX interfaces like open(), fork(), signal(), etc. The system was slow as molasses at first too but it's pretty indistinguishable from Unix now - aside from still being EBCDIC based! Anyway, I learned a lot about Unix and the shell, ported some existing tools, and wrote my own. It was a great way to learn Unix! To this day, you can find examples in their documentation that I created like this:

We can thank Douglas Adams for the reason the child exited with a 42.

Early tools!

I actually started making a few tools available back with IBM... I know I wasn't using Github at that point and I think we just put tarballs on a webserver. Since then, the tools are now hosted in a Github and I recognize some of mine at zOS-Tools-and-Toys... my name is still in a couple of the files.