A brief #introduction and potted history about how I ended up in the illumos world.

I was a Theoretical Astrophysicist, and that needed these computer things. So I used (and helped maintain) VAXes and other odd boxes as a student in Oxford, moved to Sun (mc68k) and SGI and others in Toronto, back to more Sun/VAX/Alpha kit in Cambridge and ended up running that because somebody had to.

Then some years as a sysadmin at an institute related to the Human Genome Project, where we ran mostly Sun/Solaris with some IBM kit, and then x86 Dell boxes mostly running Solaris. I logged so many bug reports against Solaris that Sun insisted I become a beta tester, which culminated in the Solaris 10 platinum beta. On which I was one of 4 people outside Sun who ran the original ZFS, the first prototype that got thrown away.

Then Sun wanted to open source Solaris, I ended up on the pilot for that, led a couple of communities, and got elected to the Governing Board. Which didn't go so well in some ways, as one of our key actions later was to shutter the project to make it clear that it was going nowhere and a reset was needed.

Out of the ashes illumos was born, after a break I went back to my project to work out how to build a distribution from scratch, learning a lot of obscure details about the inner workings, and ended up creating Tribblix.