From Jurassic Park to Gentoo: Chasing a System I Could Control

A 30-Year Journey Back to the Command Line

My first computer was an IBM XT-compatible PC in middle school, around 1989. Even in my small hometown, there were a few computer institutes, and I took classes in BASIC, COBOL, and FORTRAN. Still, none of it felt practical back then. The computer was mostly a toy — good for a few simple games, but not much else.

Once I got to high school, my first computer broke down and eventually ended up forgotten somewhere. Back then, a computer felt like nothing more than a monochrome terminal to me. I couldn’t see how it could be useful in the real world.

In 1993, I watched ‘Jurassic Park‘. Everyone around me talked about the CGI dinosaurs, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the computer scene — the moment the kid tries to use a terminal to survive, the moment she says, “It’s a UNIX system,” and starts navigating it.

The computer in the movie was completely different from the computers I knew. The graphical interface was striking — I’d never seen anything like it. It made me want to learn how to use computers the way the kid did in the film.

In 1994, I entered college as a physics major. I had wanted to study computer science, but my teacher warned me that the program was extremely competitive and that my grades likely wouldn’t get me in. He recommended physics instead — arguing that my strength in math would fit, and that I could still learn computing through physics.

In the summer of 1994, I bought a 486DX2–66 PC. This was before Windows 95, so the closest thing to a GUI I could experience was Windows 3.1 layered on top of MS-DOS. It was exciting at first — but after a while, I felt disappointed. It didn’t feel like a “real” graphical operating system.

Around the same time, I managed to get an IBM OS/2 Warp beta. That felt different — more solid, more complete, like a GUI OS that actually belonged on the machine. And yet, the interface I really wanted was still the one I’d seen in Jurassic Park.

Eventually, I learned what it was: a UNIX workstation OS — specifically IRIX from Silicon Graphics. That’s when I started wanting UNIX, not just “a computer.”

Back then, there was no realistic way for me to get access to a UNIX workstation. No one around me used UNIX, and I didn’t know anyone who could even show me what it was like. But I still wanted to experience it. Eventually, I discovered a UNIX-like system I could install on an ordinary PC: Linux.

By pure coincidence, I found a computer magazine that included Linux installation CDs as a supplement. I bought it on the spot. It was Slackware Linux, and this was 1994. No Internet. No Linux books. No one to ask. The only guidance I had was a few printed pages in that magazine.

Installing it was brutal. It took me over a week, if I remember correctly. But when I finally got X Window to launch, it felt like I’d crossed into a different world.

Linux made my computer feel like a different machine. MS-DOS, OS/2, and later Windows 95 felt like a house — simple, contained, and readable. Linux felt like a tall building: layers, stairs, locked doors, and unfamiliar hallways.

I couldn’t believe the same PC could feel so different depending on the operating system. But back then, it was only a sensation — not a path. Once the installation was done, I had nothing to do with Linux. Linux ended at the moment it successfully booted.

I eventually became a typical PC user — playing games, using BBS, and later getting a small taste of the early web. Then I did my mandatory military service, like most Korean men, for about two years.

A few guys in my unit were into computers, so we’d talk about them after hours. One day, someone asked me which OS was the best. I said, “Linux, hands down” — even though I barely knew how to use it.

He hadn’t even heard of Linux back then. But ironically, after we finished our service, he ended up getting a job working with Linux. Linux was coming.

I went back to college in 1998 after my military service. Korea was still feeling the aftershock of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, so buying a new computer wasn’t an option. Not long after, the dot-com boom arrived.

I needed to find a way to learn Linux, because during the dot-com boom it was becoming the default OS for servers everywhere. But I had two big constraints: I couldn’t afford a new computer, and I didn’t have access to a fast internet connection.

Luckily, one of my classmates worked as the unofficial “manager” of the department’s PC rooms — basically the person responsible for keeping the student labs running. I offered to help him.

That turned out to be the perfect environment to learn Linux in the real world. There were plenty of old PCs that needed to be repaired and tested, and — more importantly — there was an actual network with static IPs, not the dynamic-IP home setups people had through ADSL or cable modems. It was the closest thing I could get to a real server environment, and it gave me a place to experiment safely.

I spent many nights in the lab installing Linux on old machines. One night, a professor walked in, saw me still working, and asked what I was doing. I said I was setting up a web server and bulletin boards so students could share information.

A few days later, he came back with an offer: five new PCs, placed in a separate room, and permission to use them as a dedicated test environment.

It felt like I’d suddenly been handed the ideal playground. Within a month, I had a domain name, an Apache web server, Sendmail for email, FTP for file transfers on Debian — and even DNS servers on FreeBSD.

But no one else cared. My classmates wanted Windows 2000 on those machines for homework, chatting, and games. I remember feeling oddly alone, like I was building something for an audience that didn’t exist yet.

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was about to break. Around 2000, I watched someone with no CS background complete a six-month training program and get hired in IT. Instead of motivating me, it made me uneasy — competition was clearly going to explode. And the dot-com boom felt like a bubble, even if I couldn’t yet articulate why.

After a lot of thought, I walked away from the lab.

In 2002, right after graduation, I joined a large electronics company — even though I knew almost nothing about semiconductors. What I did have was a strong English test score. At the time in Korea, GPA and standardized English scores mattered a lot for getting into big companies.

After I left the lab, I made a deliberate decision to aim for that route. I spent about a year preparing for TOEIC and pushed my score to near the top.

After that, I became a normal PC user again. In my job, Excel and PowerPoint mattered far more than Linux. I felt a vague desire to have my own kind of system, but I couldn’t clearly explain what that meant at the time.

I still didn’t like later versions of Windows, so at home in the 2000s I used an Apple PowerBook G4. Linux gradually faded out of my life. macOS — then still called OS X — felt like the best operating system to me, and I remained a Mac user for many years.

Recently, however, macOS and Windows have started to feel increasingly similar. That change didn’t bother me much, because by then I was just a regular user.

For most of the last two decades, I’ve lived as a normal macOS user while working in the compound semiconductor industry. A lot happened, but this post isn’t about that history.

What matters is this: the industry is shrinking, and the illusion of stability is gone. So I’m back in a familiar place — re-evaluating my career the way I did around 2000, when I walked away from the lab.

I previously wrote a post titled “For 30 Years, I Only Printed ‘Hello World.’” It was about how I started learning Python, not as a hobby, but as a practical response to what my job increasingly demands.

[embed]For 30 Years, I Only Printed “Hello World” Until I Finally Started Writing Codemedium.com

Manufacturing data analysis used to mean Excel. Then it became Spotfire dashboards. But now the problem has changed again. As systems grow more complex and uncertainty rises, analysis becomes less about reporting and more about exploring. And dashboards — no matter how polished — can’t keep up with that.

That’s why the work is shifting toward Python-based pipelines and code-driven analysis.

Anyway, writing code lately has been reminding me of my earlier Linux days — like going back into “deeper” systems. Python runs fine on Windows and macOS, but for some reason I feel pulled back toward the Linux world.

Of course, macOS is Unix-based, and even Windows now has Linux via WSL. It’s almost funny to realize how intensely Linux users used to hate Windows.

Thinking back to Jurassic Park, I used to believe what impressed me was the GUI. But maybe that’s not the core of it. What really grabbed me was the feeling that I could control the whole system. That’s probably why Linux appealed to me more than macOS.

From that perspective, Ubuntu- or Fedora-style “it just works” Linux was never really my thing. Even back around 2000, I chose Debian over Red Hat — not because it was more convenient, but because I enjoyed going closer to the system level rather than staying in a polished, user-friendly layer.

Recently, I installed Gentoo Linux on an old ThinkPad W520.

Gentoo is a tough distribution. Installation takes a long time, and you run into plenty of errors along the way. Before the LLM era, I probably would have chosen Arch instead. Gentoo didn’t feel practical — almost like a waste of time for everyday use.

But with an LLM beside me, the experience changed. I could troubleshoot faster, understand what was happening, and learn more deeply from each failure. It no longer feels like wasted effort. The problems are the curriculum.

That said, this ThinkPad isn’t going to be my main machine. Gentoo feels more like a laboratory — a place to explore the system at a lower level. Portage updates happen often, builds take time, and that friction interrupts daily work.

And still… the scrolling build logs on the screen feel strangely comforting. It’s the sensation that I’m watching the system become, and that I’m in control of the process. I could run a fake “flowing text” app on any OS, but on Gentoo the messages are real. They’re the system doing real work, not a simulation.

That’s why I choose Gentoo — even if it never becomes my primary OS.

As a small aside, I once had a chance to use IRIX — the Unix system from Jurassic Park. By then I was already comfortable with Linux, so IRIX felt surprisingly familiar — almost like the kid in the movie.

It was a quiet moment of closure: what I had been chasing wasn’t a “cool GUI,” but the feeling of being inside a system I could understand and control.

That realization changes how I see my current transition.

I’m not learning Python to become a programmer. I’m learning it to regain control — over my work, over my data, over the systems I depend on.

Gentoo is the same impulse. It’s not about using the “best” OS. It’s about understanding what’s underneath.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing all along: returning to the system level, again and again, whenever the surface stops making sense.