My father is electronic engineer with great interest in microprocessors and programming languages. At the time I was born, he was playing with computers connected to the TV that uses K7 tapes as storage media. As my father was closely watching the development of microprocessors, I grew up surounded by computers and electronic gadgets with microprocessors. The first computer I used was based on Z80 processor. The first PC had clock of 4 MHz. In 1993, I was with 11 years old when I won my first PC. It was a 286 with 1024KB of memory and HD of 40MB. I used to use Microsoft Word for DOS and old games like Flight Simulator 4, Stunts, Street Rod, F1GP, LHX and Wolfenstein 3D. Someone told me about Windows 3.1 and I tried it. It was not fast on my 286 but it worked. I got disappointed when Sim City 2000 did not run on my PC. It required protected mode and a video card with a minimum of 512KB of memory.

Peter, my father

Two years later, I won a brand new 486 DLC 33MHz with 8MB of RAM and 100MB hard drive. DLC means no coprocessor but the machine was great. I spent a lot of time editing config.sys and autoexec.bat to have free memory using MS-DOS 5. It was required to have a lot of free memory under first 640KB to run modern games like DOOM, Theme Park and Duke Nukem 3D. I tried different combinations of “DOS=HIGH,UMB”, “HIMEM.SYS” and “EMM386.EXE” lines to get every bit of free memory. I remember that using MS DoubleSpace was not good idea. “If you are mad, use DoubleSpace and do not backup your data”.

As my father used Novell Netware at work, he noted that a home network would be good idea for us. He installed Novell DOS 7 at our computers to make our first home network. We shared files and the printer. Novell DOS 7 did not uses memory under 640KB(or uses just some KBs) but somehow the games did not like memory management and refused to run. We used NE2000 compliant cards with ISA bus and coaxial cables. Then we tested Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. I remember that instead of using IPX/SPX like Novell, Windows 3.11 used by default a strange protocol named TCP/IP. We did performance tests comparing Novell DOS 7 and Microsoft Windows 3.11 for Workgroups using the same hardware and Windows were much faster and much easier to configure than Novel DOS 7.

I got very happy when Microsoft released MS-DOS 6.22 with memmaker. All I had to do was type memmamker and wait for two system boots. After the second system boot every bit of free memory will be available with no need of hand editing config.sys and autoexec.bat. We used MS-DOS 6.22 with Windows 3.11 at home.

After that, we upgraded to Windows 95.

Far before I had my first PC, my father already used modems for file transfer between two computers and to connect to BBS. I used my PCs with modems and connected sometimes to Persocom and to my friends' BBS.

Then my father decided to make his own Internet Service Provider. He bought two high end 486 DX4 100MHz, a Cisco Router with 16 serial ports and eight 28,800bps USRobotics modems. He contracted two people that were specialist in unknown software named Linux.

At that time I was curious about Linux but I didn’t get how an operating system could be useful without games, with slow graphical interface and with confuse directory structure…

After having Internet access and E-mail, I started to be interested in web site design. I started with a personal page than moved to FS4AH! ( Flight Simulator 4 Airplanes Home! ) that was an site with tons of airplanes for Flight Simulator 4. As the number of airplanes were high I made Perl scripts to help me make the html files.

After moving to a K56Flex modem I started to play Quake online and “Damn, I’m good!”

I do not remember exactly when my PC was upgraded but I had a Pentium 100MHz, an Pentium 233 MMX, an AMD K6-2 500MHz, an AMD Duron, and my last PC had Athlon XP Barton Core processor.

My father was always buying new servers and was installing Linux on them. To make it better, ID Software released Quake for Linux.

I decided to install Linux on my PC. Using LOADLIN it was not necessary to install boot loaders like LILO or to have boot diskettes. Thanks to FIPS I was able to resize my partition to install Linux. I installed Slackware Linux. I spent the entire weekend to be able to use my Linux installation. Make X11 work with my video card was much harder than increase freely available memory in DOS.

Linux became serious stuff for me in 2002 when I started to work with my father. At that time he had more than 20 Linux servers.

At 2003, I decided to have my own business. First I converted Playstation pads to PC and sold the modified version as new products. After selling a few pads(and after read Michael Dell biografhy) I started to need a virtual store on the Internet.

I found a virtual store wrote in PHP that looked very easy to use. This software had basic functions like shopping cart and session control, but was not well finished. I spend a lot of working hours to make it usable and good looking.

During the virtual store development I decided to not sell the pads but PC hardware like mother boards, processors and HDs.

The virtual store parahard.com was ready and started to sell. I made banners for Terra and Yahoo. The first sales were a very important moment for me. Unfortunately I did not take the virtual store very seriously and for not having cash for maintaining it for some months I closed it.

In 2004, the bioinformatics lab of my university had money to buy one high end Intel Xeon server with two processors and 2GB of RAM. I convinced my teacher to buy parts to make eight ultra inexpensive desktops and mount them. After consult Tom’s hardware guide site and contact our local supplier I made a report indicating with graphs that the processor with better relation between cost and performance for genetic sequencing was AMD Athlon XP 2800+ Barton core with 512kb of cache. The report also indicated that the mother board with the best relation was Asus A7V600-X with VIA KT600/VT8237 chipset. Realtek had low cost PCI Gigabit Ethernet cards (I did not know that PCI bandwidth is lower than 300mbit) and we decided to use it. We bought 8 processors, 8 motherboards, 8 HDs, 8 … After assembly all the eight machines, the big problem was how to use eight independent processors on the same task? The answer is the Linux distribution Rocks Clusters.

Bioinformatics cluster

Rocks Clusters is a well made Linux Distribution that enables you to make an HPC / mathematic / BeoWulf computer clusters. It also enables you to make a Grid.

The first successful MPIBLAST run using all the eight processors took a bit less than a month to start. After all was well configured the cluster reached more than 17GFlops of sustained computing power.

The main problems of the cluster were the huge amount of heat that it produced and high power consumption. I had no idea about those two factors. The cluster produced so much heat that it burned the air conditioning system twice.

My first notebook came in 2005. It was one Averatec 3360, Intel Centrino 1.6 with 2MB of cache, DVD burner and 12” LCD.

On the beginning of 2006, talking to friends about Linux I noted that there was a thing named RHCE that was really respected by friends and by companies. There was less than five person certified by Red Hat as RHCE on Brasilia that time. I decided that I want to be RHCE certified. I started looking on Internet and collecting all information available. I found that Michael Jang wrote a book for those who want to pass RH302 exam and get RHCE certification. I read the book from the first page to almost the end. Then, I went to Sao Paulo to take the exam without the Fast Track course. It was wonderful. I was really happy to be doing that. I liked the environment and the persons I met. As I did not studied all topics I was not able to reach the minimum score and I got only RHCT certification. After taking RHCE exam, I met a lot of people from Red Hat, including Miro, and immediately started to work with him. On August of the same year, I went to Sao Paulo again and did the fast track course and the exam. Again it was wonderful. I took my RHCE and come back very happy to home. If you want to do something exciting about computers, consider taking RHCE scertification.

On the second half of 2006 at my university, I studied Operating Systems with focus on Linux. The final project was to make a kernel hack with two system calls and a kernel thread. This was my first kernel modification and it was very interesting. Thanks to my teacher Raissa Dantas.

I continued to work with Parâmettro until December 18 of 2006 when I was hired by ThinNetworks. My first mission at ThinNetworks was to continue the development of a embedded Linux distribution. Today, besides this distribution we developed and maintain other two distributions. The newest is "Linux Educacional 2.0"(means Educational Linux) that was made for Educational Market. As product manager, I coordinate new products projects and look for new partners and suppliers inside and outside Brazil.