"Just for fun" was one of the many famous remarks of Linus Torvalds. When he started the Linux kernel project in 1991 his announcement of the project said it was "just a hobby," and later a book by Linus and David Diamond cited the project (through the book title) as Just for Fun.

When I met Linus at a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) User's Society (DECUS) event in New Orleans in May of 1994, I saw a very intense, but likable, college student who enjoyed programming and liked the study and design of a Unix-like kernel. Linus was in a good place for "having fun," because the users of DEC's equipment and software had been meeting and exchanging software they had written for many years.

In high school I had three years of electronics class, mostly analog electronics – with tubes, resistors, capacitors, and coils – designing analog radio receivers and transmitters, among other things. I was a quiet kid, a bookworm that did not have many friends, and when I decided to go to Drexel University (at that time named Drexel Institute of Technology) in 1968, the change in my environment allowed me to make friends.

In 1969 I first encountered programming. I had a co-op job at the Western Electric Company, the manufacturing arm of the Bell System, and I signed up for a free correspondence course in how to program an IBM 1130 computer system in FORTRAN. Over three different co-op periods I became better and better at programming that computer through that course as well as taking a few additional classes at Drexel.

DECUS was a big part of that learning, because their library of user-contributed software allowed me to afford the software I needed for just the cost of copying the software. In turn I learned from the software I obtained from DECUS and wrote my own, sharing my thoughts and knowledge with other students.

I helped to start the first computer club at Drexel, with other students who learned to program the little (4,096 12-bit word PDP-8) computers we had available to us in the electrical engineering labs.

Eventually I changed majors from electrical engineering to commerce and engineering (half electrical engineering and half business with a small smattering of data processing courses) because I found that programming the machines was more fun (for me) than trying to design them, and I found meeting with other programmers and exchanging ideas and code easier than meeting with other electrical engineers and trying to exchange ideas with them.

My first job out of university was mostly programming IBM 360/370 machines, so I moved away from DECUS, but I made a lot more friends among other programmers and operators of the computers, going out for beer after work and talking about the problems we were trying to solve and ways of solving them. It was fun.

Eventually (1977-1980) I taught at Hartford State Technical College (HSTC) and DECUS sprang into my life again. I obtained software from DECUS to share with my students and became familiar again with DEC hardware and operating systems. I desperately wanted to get a copy of Unix for our systems, but HSTC did not qualify as a "research" university, so the cost of an AT&T Source Code License was out of reach for us. Still, the many operating systems and codebases obtainable from DEC and DECUS helped keep computers "fun" for me – and teaching the students, taking them from knowing nothing about computers to knowing how to write complex systems was probably the most fun I ever had.

Eventually in 1980, I left HSTC to work for Bell Labs, meeting Unix for the first time and more formally becoming involved with DECUS and its Unix Special Interest Group (UNISIG). I started going to DECUS meetings, both local and regional, and meeting other Unix people.

In 1983 I joined DEC's Unix Group and we started (as many companies did) producing their version of Unix systems. However, my love for DECUS, the exchange of software and working with others "just for fun," continued.

This year is the 40th year of the GNU project, and of course (depending on how you measure it), the distributions of GNU/Linux have been in existence for more than 30 years.

I am worried, however, that we are losing some of the "fun." Many of the local user groups (LUGs) from the early days of "Linux" have disappeared, and companies (for better or worse and with a few notable exceptions) have taken over the creation and driving of the distributions.

While there are several projects that have injected "fun" into computers (the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone come to mind), I think we need to make Linux (more) fun again. Next month I hope to suggest some actionable ideas on this.

Carpe Diem.