I recall being in a B. Dalton Bookstore in the mid-90's. I picked up a book that had "Linux" on the cover. In the cover it had a floppy disk or two. Something felt very wrong to me. You can't give away an entire operation system! Perhaps this was just some "free for educational purposes" thing? I went home and fired up WebCrawler on AOL and came across Yggdrasil. I had experienced Unix on an SGI system. And I was very familiar with AmigaOS, so this idea of a free Unix-like OS that I could install on commodity hardware was intriguing. A friend of mine bought the RedHat 5.2 distro from Best Buy and offered to let me borrow the CD-ROM. I was like, "that's piracy... no thanks". He said, "no, dude... you don't get it. It's free.".
Looking back, I sometimes think. "How could you have been so into computers and NOT known about this???" Then I remember. Information just didn't travel as freely in those days. It was simply possible not to know things. Even though I read computer magazines, they were VERY focused on Windows or Mac. Once I found a distro I could install from floppies (Dragon Linux I think) I messed around until I got X running. Then it was CD-ROMs from CheapBytes and LinuxMall. In 1998 and 1999 I bet I installed every distro one could buy for 2 dollars on CD-ROM! I was a full time user. I have been ever since.
In the spirit of "how could I not have known that:" back in college there was a terminal in a room in the physics department basement where I could log in and check my email. Nearby was a bookshelf with a bunch of tattered books that seemed to have been left by former students. Some Asimov, some Douglas Adams, books about Fortran and C, and a book about Unix. Absent-mindedly flipping through those books one day (as one did before one discovered the web) I noticed that the Unix command line prompt looked like what I saw when I logged in to read my mail. Huh. I tried some things from the book, and they worked just like Unix was supposed to. This thing I had been using to check my email all year could do other stuff! That was really cool, but not all that personally useful to me, until I read something in the book that made me realize there was probably a C compiler. There was! Even better, there was a C++ compiler. From then on I was hooked. Programming for me had been a hobby before I came to college, a way of avoiding real work. I had heard of C++ and wanted to learn it, but I had read that the compilers were really expensive, and I was afraid of asking my parents to buy me one. Here was one I could use for free! So naturally I ended up spending a lot of hours writing C++ code in that basement instead of doing my math and physics work, and that's how I acquired the skills that landed me my first job.
As for Linux, there was a CS major in my dorm who installed Linux and BeOS on his PC and did his programming assignments on them, but I never had the courage to do that, because I was afraid that if I screwed up my computer and couldn't immediately fix it, it would mess up my work for other classes. I didn't take that risk until years later, when I no longer had to turn in writing assignments in Microsoft Word format.
Wow, very similar experience here with the email-terminal starting point, except instead of the C compiler, which was indeed a pretty awesome discovery, I discovered I could write shell scripts, just like those described by hacker-hunter Cliff Stoll.
I had been writing DOS batch files with the help of PC Magazine utils for years, and shell scripts looked absolutely amazing. From that point on I pretty much always had to know where I could go to get unix or Linux shell access...
I remember discussions back the day between Linux and Windows proponents. I was clearly in the Windows camp, seeing Linux fans as, well, bizarre sometimes arrogant pseudo programmers. That changed, now that Linux is probably the last OS I can run without a cloud account easily. Heck, I'd even pay for it!
Back the day I was a gamer, the main reason why Linux never really was an option. Later for work, it was Windows all the way for obvious reasons. Privately I am on Ubuntu now, along with LibreOffice. Won't go back, Windows turned into a major PIA when I tried to run different Teams and Office accounts not linked to the Windows 10 license due to home schooling and two kids. Gone were the days that a license key was all you needed. There is still a Windows boot partition, company hardware is Windows anyway.
The only thing I have a hard time getting rid of is Excel. I am so used to that...
Almost everyone has been through that "mine is better than yours" distro war phase, adopting Linux (distros) as a religion is just stupid ;-)
Some of the gold I've accumulated over the years when converting Windows users and/or giving talks
- All Linux distributions are the same: the Linux kernel, glibc and a bunch of GNU utils.
- "Adopting Linux like a religion is stupid." - Thomas Cameron
- "We've all been through my distro is better than yours" thing.
- "The best Linux distro is the one that does what you need at the best cost."
- Linux is NOT about the distribution but the kernel, it's about what the kernel can do.
- Distribution is a way to wrap up what the kernel can do into a more manageable way.
Oh the days of being on Slashdot and getting downmodded to -1 Troll because you dare to suggest that Windows is a usable operating system and not type Micro$uck or some other variant.
I was actually quite fond of WinNT4. Lean and stable.
Microsoft being the Evil Empire and facing antitrust for bundling Internet Explorer was, of course, cheered on... meanwhile very similar groups of geeks these days see no problem with Apple only allowing Safari to be the web browser engine on iOS...
I think most of the teenager mindset moved towards the Apple camp. Apple has been far more restrictive and anticompetitive than Microsoft ever was at its worst. Mention something like how Safari being the only allowed web engine on iOS and get downvoted, don't agree that Google is the ultimate evil and point out they're open sourcing Android, Chromium and etc... get downvoted.
The embrace of Apple on tech sites is something I'll never understand considering the attitudes that were prevalent when it came to Microsoft just a decade or two before.
I usually donate to FOSS projects I use since you can't pay for them in the traditional sense but I still want to support the developers. KDE is my favorite thus far.
While I wouldn't quite call it prominence, nor can I imagine you could make a living with it exclusively, elementary OS has something of a Linux app store with their AppCenter. Flipping through the website it seems to offer developers the standard 70/30 split.
It's quite simple, the market for paid end user applications on Linux is tiny. Canonical was saying years ago that they were going to add paid applications to the Snap Store but seemingly never got around to it. Elementary's App Center has integrated payments but they are optional and ~99% of users do not pay anything.
You can certainly make a living selling a cross platform application that supports Linux, but it's probably quite difficult to make much of a living selling Linux-only applications.
I think an app store would be a great location to not have optional payments for open source software if developers do not want it. Users can choose to go get and compile the source, download a third-party binary and keep it updated themselves, or pay for it and know it's directly from the authors and automatically updated and getting a path to support and the interested customers know the only people submitting reviews are people who paid for it and not drive by opinionated users like is common in open source software.
I'd say the existing app stores plugged on distribution repos (apt) provide a very large amount of free software, thus reducing the incentive to look for paid software.
For the seller, being able to sell is one thing, having to run software in a tiny and extremely fragmented market (a large bunch of slightly different distros) is another one. Then osx happened, and the linux desktop never happened.
I'll put it on the list once my Office 365 about expired. Because that Eco system, open source alternatives to MS, Google and so on, are more needed then ever. Or I just started to recognize how important they are.
I was using Coherent at the time, and Linux people was posting in comp.os.coherent how good Linux was. When MWC folded people from MWC suggested moving to a BSD because at least the BSD people did not troll the group.
I ended up with Slackware because the PC I had at the time was too lite for a BSD.
Gaming is still a major sticking point when it comes to Windows alternatives. But for Linux specifically, another one is web streaming: some popular services will outright refuse to stream on Linux, presumably due to DRM concerns.
I have no problem with either one of those. I watch Netflix, YouTube, DailyMotion and Vimeo without issue, and game performance is quite good under modern Proton. If those were your two big sticking points, it's probably time to try Linux again.
Which platforms have you had issues with? All the ones I use (HBO Max, Crunchyroll, Netflix, Disney+, Amazon and Hulu) work fine, surprisingly. You do sometimes need to use a closed browser (Chrome, particularly) or enable DRM (Firefox), though.
Not sure if that's ever gonna happen. I could imagine, now that Steam tool care of a huge junk of gaming, Office is the main thing keeping a sizable number of people on Windows. Imagine if MS was reduced to MS Excel...
It was always like that since the Windows days, Office drove the next UI improvements which would later appear as Windows common controls.
The current UI chaos is because the Windows team has become mostly the Cloud team, while the UI frameworks seem to keep rotating new people every couple of years.
They had to literally restaff WinForms and WPF teams from scratch, and then merged them with WinUI/UWP!
Seems reasonable. And to be honest, Teams is good for professional collaboration. And the MS Office suite isn't too bad. I used to be soslo founder until recently, and for that Office 365 was just perfect. No VPN, no really worries about it security. And even pricing was, I'd say, reasonable. Customer service is shit show, so.
They're basically trying to with Office 365. The OS is a commodity, so move everything into the browser. Then you can sell to the shops that are running Chromebooks, and support Mac without a separate team.
> A friend of mine bought the RedHat 5.2 distro from Best Buy
Ahh wow, this brings me back.
I bought, or rather had my parents buy, this exact same package from Best Buy when I was in high school or maybe the end of middle school. I remember thinking in the store that it was impossible for there to be something that wasn't Windows or Mac, and the packaging was so cool.
These were also the "10,000 Best Windows Games" shareware CD-ROM days (anyone remember the Aztech Cube pack? [1]) I was fascinated by the fact that Red Hat came with thousands of "packages" that weren't shareware. And that thicc documentation, wow so sexy. A printed catalog with info on each package. I remember feeling a sense of limitless possibility while flipping through its pages.
Installed Red Hat on a Pentium 1 Baby-AT tower that I picked up from Goodwill for $20. My friend and I spray painted it that summer and I slapped a 52x Creative Technologies branded CD-ROM drive with a cable that connected directly to a genuine Creative SoundBlaster sound card for music CD playback. I remember thinking how cool I was to have a Creative CD-ROM drive working with my Creative SoundBlaster playing Vertical Horizon's "Everything You Want" on Linux. All I needed was a KVM switch to play Civ 2 on my junkyard Win 95 Gateway pizza box sitting next to it.
Vertical Horizon's "Everything You Want" specifically spoke to me here because that was the EXACT era!!! I know I ripped that song using a connection of Perl scripts, then used LAME encoder in connection with some lyrics fetching script to encode the lyrics into the mp3 metadata.
I used Linux for the first time around 1993, and had it installed on a 386SX(?) with a satisfying amber monochrome screen, both of which I got for less than $100 total, IIRC.
Anyway, I had a friend whose mother ran a small data processing business, and it was known in our circle of nerd friends that she was in possession of a "real Unix machine". And what a machine it was - a beige box the size of a small car, with intriguing lights and cables and powerful hums and clicks. Anyway, I told her about this "Linux" thing, and she dismissed it as fantasy, so I brought my computer around to her office and gave her a demo.
The only comment I recall her making was something like, "Well, looks like you got yourself a $100 Unix machine."
I could tell in her eyes, though, that she was feeling the world shift, heavily, from one epoch to the next.
I didn't use Linux proper until 2000. I had used Minix in around 1988/89 for an operating systems class. Never struck me as odd to be running a unix on my 8088 PC with 1 floppy drive. At the time it just seemed like a more powerful DOS.
I had a very similar "I can get a whole operating system for free?" eye opening experience when I got Slackware on a bunch of floppies.
I also picked tcsh for my main shell based off some blurb I read and spent a few months unlearning what I learned when I was actually given a task to maintain a Linux system a few years later.
I knew about Linux before trying it, so the free part was no surprise. My uncanny valley was being able to recompile the kernel with any options I wanted to; that felt both cool and unnatural, like "why aren't protecting their source code?".
Building from source was the fun part when I first got into Linux. Trying to get the modules down to the smallest subset possible that would run on my machine just to see how fast I could get it to boot.
Tricky part was it was a dual boot Windows installation on a single hard drive, I was always worried I would screw something up that I couldn't recover from since I needed the computer for school. Somehow I didn't mess up anything I couldn't recover from.
Compiling your own kernel was kind of a rite of passage back in the day. Now I cannot remember when I last did that. Must have been 14 years or so, when I was still using Gentoo.
I did that a few years ago for a semi-bricked WM8850 netbook which I can't reflash with Uberoid, a custom Android for these ARM machines.
So I set up a VFAT partition with the kernel, a boot image file, and maybe I'll add some Void Linux root filesystem on an ext3 partition tomorrow.
It's worse because booting from an SD card is not very realiable, but it's better than nothing.
I had a teacher I was talking to (he looked kinda young to me) and he said he remembered when he first used linux when it had come out. What was mind blowing to me was that it was in his lifetime right after I was born.
When I was about 12 or 13 I ran a website called freelin.org. This was around 2001. Its goal was to provide Linux on CD to anyone who asked, globally, without cost. My hope was that donations would cover costs. They didn’t. I tried my best to supply everyone based on pocket money (allowance) at the time. To my shame, a few people who donated £1 didn’t get a CD. If this was you, please let me know and I will make it up to you. I apologise.
My enthusiasm was powered by the ability to do good by using my cable internet connection to download ISOs in trivial time.
I cut a strange figure at the post office every Saturday sending packages to places like Macedonia.
I remember stumbling upon freelin.org back then. I didn't donate (I already had enough bandwidth at that time to acquire the distros I wanted), but I admired being dedicated to Linux that much to provide a service like that.
Grew up in China, the first Linux distro, in fact non-Windows OS was Red Bar Linux 6.3 (I form of CDs sold in those pirated software shops, never saw Linux on floppy), no one else around me use anything other than Windows (99.99% pirated). It opened up a door for me, later on I bought Mandrake Linux 8.1 (with Chinese input method and fonts - displaying CJK was pain back then).
Fedora Core 1 was my main desktop and the (Distro Hopping & learning) journey continues, and picking up the skill tree around Linux brought me where I am today ;-)
Note: Tried Slackware 10, like its KISS and BSD style rc but it wasn't liveable for me back then. Stuck with Fedore (Core) for very long until Ubuntu 6.06 (Canonical post CDs) and later tried Arch Linux (very close to Slackware before the systemd migration...).
I live in Indonesia and have a very similar experience and situation (99.99% pirated Windows) with you. From Mandrake 8 to Fedora to Ubuntu 6. I remembered the time when I got my Ubuntu and Kubuntu CDs posted. The experience of using apt to download and update packages were a mindblowing experience at that time. That and the simplicity of Ubuntu was the main reason that I managed to persuade the management in the company where i work to migrate from win98 to ubuntu.
Good to know, it was enlightening to have the opportunity to see, think and experience different than the majority (others). I didn't realise back then it would have such an impact on me and the journey forward.
I wrote this at Linux's 30th birthday: Building a skill tree around Linux has been the best investment I've ever made for the past 18 years. I believe it is likewise for you ;-)
I dug out the 3 CDs and box Mandrake Linux 8.1 came with (2 are Mandrake 8.1 and 1 for fonts + input method framework) in the attic last time I visited my parents house ;-)
I sometimes wish I'd heard of Linux a few years earlier. I didn't graduate high school until 1995, and didn't know much about Usenet until I got to college. Once I did, I learned there was a whole world of interesting, and disgustingly weird/creepy "stuff" on the internet.
Anyway, sometime around 1996/97 I started using Linux (dual booting Win95 because I wasn't ready to try to live there), for all my programming assignment work as the options were to go to campus or dial up over the modem pool (not enough modems!) hoping to get a phone line to do my homework.
Linux was a lot closer to the environment we were coding in, though DJGPP had helped me out a fair amount before I went to a more Unixy environment.
We used a single RS/6000 running some version of AIX for email, usenet, and programming assignments across a student body of nearly 6000 of us kids... What a time! We made unwise use of telnet, "talk", finger, even learned to do so across the internet to other Unix machines we found. In our spare time we played Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3d, Descent. We played around with token ring networks, 10base-T ethernet, GNU Hurd, FreeBSD.
The closest I get to feel to those nostalgic days is messing around with Plan 9 and 9front nowadays. So happy it's been MIT licensed (just this year), and Inferno also.
My parents gave me a "laptop" in 1995, with a 386 processor, and 4 megs of ram. Even for the time it wasn't very powerful (my dad had a 486 desktop), but it was all mine, and I spent something like a whole weekend downloading the Slackware floppies.
I thought it was just the coolest thing ever that every single piece of software on that system had source code that I could read and learn from.
I used the 'jed' editor because Emacs was a bit heavy duty for the memory the system had.
My next computer was a more powerful desktop that was able to run Emacs, the X windowing system and all that. I put Debian on it, and still use Ubuntu, a derivative of Debian.
My first installation in 1995 or 1996 was from a set of about 12 overwritten AOL floppy disks my friend had built from his installation of Slackware onto a 386SX. Later I got a 486 with a first gen 1x Sony CDROM drive that had it's own controller card, and I didn't have documentation for the DMA and IRQ settings. I had a RedHat CD from a magazine, so I had to go through a very long installation startup process from boot floppies to get to the CD config, and just kept guessing and rebooting until it finally worked and I discovered it wouldn't read the CD. I ended up going to a RedHat installfest somewhere in Maryland in the DC suburbs, I think at a Navy facility? It was on a Saturday and we were alone in this big government building and I remember there being a big rolling display of slices of a monkey brain in the lab where the installfest was being held. They had loaner 3Com 10baseT cards and a network install server running, so I was finally able to get it all working.
Also 1995 or 96 for me. I had read about Linux on the web and attempted to download a floppy version and install it, but to no avail. Then I saw a book with accompanying Slackware CD in the bookstore. Best investment I ever made. I /devoured/ that book and got it all working. The desire to have my own free UNIX on my PC probably drove me to learn faster than I have before or since. The rest is history...
The ancient (read 90s) distros are a lot of fun to play with. Redhat still have a lot of their legacy distributions available and they are installable on vmware. You can learn a heck of a lot with really early distributions. I remember how complicated they seemed at the time but compared to nowadays it's pretty easy to have all the system components in your head at any one time.
I spent a week or so upgrading component by component redhat 5.0 (hurricane) to be able to run a more modern version of glibc learning a lot about the c runtime stack under linux in the process.
Yes, I find 90s distros (I started with a strange linux distro called minilinux using an umsdos file system which I would start by typing 'linux' on the dos prompt, then moved on to Slackware 3 and redhat 2 around 1995 if I remember well) to be significantly simpler.
Basically, they contain very little, so you can pretty much understand everything .
Then, it's the usual 'build on it, get bigger, add complexity' , but knowing the early model makes understanding the modern product much easier.
> Basically, they contain very little, so you can pretty much understand everything .
Slackware (7) mentored me into Linux competence. RedHat was making itself more convenient at the time, but if the system got into a bad state, it was very hard for me to figure out how to correct it.
Slackware setup was more of a chore, but man did I end up an understanding of what was going on! I RTFMed because the M was fantasic. And if something did go wrong, I would usually have some ideas about where to start. That was such a valuable experience.
I ordered a copy of SLS on floppy disk from a guy out in Seattle or Portland (I forget) via an ad in the back of Computer Shopper magazine in the early 90s. I installed it on a Tandy 1000 RSX (386SX 25Mhz) my parents had recently replaced with an IBM PS/2 Model 77 (with a 486DX2 50Mhz). I was obsessed with Linux almost immediately because I could compile and run some of the software that I had gotten used to using on the UNIX mainframe I dialed into at the university nearby to get SLIP internet access. Stuff like Gopher, PINE for mail, etc.
That experience pretty much cemented my love of computers and determined the trajectory of my life/career afterwards. In a lot of ways, Linux saved me from working construction with my dad in the small town I grew up in and allowed me to escape.
Does anyone remember Win4Lin? It would run Windows 98 as a process and translate system calls to their Linux equivalent. It was very convient for testing my websites in IE. And I swear it was faster and more stable than running Windows on bare hardware. And when it did blue screen, I could have it back up in a matter of seconds.
Around that time, I vaguely recall Linux switching from DWARF to ELF, some kind of libc5 (libc4 ??) to libc6 migration in the the ecosystem and a Sanyo CDROM driver that needed some source code edits to work for my model causing me endless grief as a kid exploring beyond DOS. Great times!
I was running either a Slackware or SLS distro when I did the a.out to ELF transition. I remember the libc migration occurring but I don't recall the details. It amazes me that I pulled it off given how little I understood about how the system actually worked. My experience, up to that point, was with MS-DOS and being a user on a Xenix system (but not a sysadmin). I was really, really excited to have a Unix-like OS at home, but definitely didn't understand how shared libraries worked, etc.
I remember doing that, as well. I had Slackware running with some custom patches. I had to upgrade the kernel, libc, ld.so, and a bunch of other stuff. For a while, I had a system that ran both a.out and ELF binaries. This was back in 1996 or so?
I think '96. I remember a friend, who I only ever met face-to-face at Defcon 4, telling me that he didn't think I could pull off the migration and that I should just reload the system. That pins it at '96.
Slackware was a bit late transitioning from libc5 to GNU libc. I dropped a copy of GNU libc from Red Hat onto my Slackware box, and binaries that expected GNU libc pretty much just worked.
It was a.out to ELF, there was separate stabs to DWARF migration afaik related to how debugging info was stored.
For me, the biggest migration pain was being a heavy KDE user in the middle of GCC 2.95 -> GCC 3.0 migration, with my Debian unstable (in between woody and sarge, iirc) getting into state where half of the C++ code was compiled with 2.95, and half with 3.0...
I remember occasionally contributing to libc at that time. libc4 was a.out, at least that was the name I remember. libc5 was the first ELF libc and libc6 is glibc.
SLS Linux was my first distro. It was probably early 1993 when I first installed it, on a 386SX/20 with 3 megs of RAM. I think it was on 12 or 16 floppies.
I ordered a set of SLS floppies from some random person I learned about via Usenet news groups (comp.os.minix and later comp.os.linux). It used Linux kernel version 0.99pl12 or thereabouts.
I had previously been using Coherent Unix (with the enormous compendium in a thick book).
I was first setting up my home NFS server using NE2000 Ethernet cards to try all that out.
This was all run on a Gateway 386 @ 25MHz which started with 4MB of RAM.
I still have an InfoMagic 6-CD set from April 1996 and a retail copy of Red Hat 5.1 among my old disks. I'm almost tempted to try one of them out in VM for old times' sake.
I was aware of Linux, but did not try a distro until SLS (Soft Landing System). It was distributed on a pile of 3.5" floppies, and booted from a floppy too. I moved to Yggdrasil (running from CD-ROM) to get the benefit of a full install with X and development tools in an era when the 650MB CD-ROM had three times the capacity of a high-end hard drive.
Ah, Yggdrasil Linux!
The Fall 1994 CD has been my first ever contact with the Linux world. I was with some colleagues doing some shopping for my company at that IT store, saw the CD and recalled that some friends on the local BBS (social media? What social media?!?) were praising it, so bought it and that's when it all started. Well, not quite, because the CD was damaged with errors about in the middle of the operation, which was very long, therefore hard to spot, and the installation procedure would continue anyway, so in the end I had a system which was bootable but often gave errors about files missing, this and that. I had no Internet connection back then, so I played with it as much as I could, but in the end had to wait a couple years before finding a perfectly working copy of Red Hat bundled within a magazine, and that became the actual start.
Back when I started using Linux, I had an ISDN card, getting that to work was an adventure back then, except on SuSE which provided a GUI for that. Fun times... ;-)
I grabbed SLS off a BBS in mid to late 1993. I was 12 and had a 386 with 8mb of ram and a monochrome display. I didn't at all use X11 at the time, but I loved that I could switch between virtual consoles, had real multi-tasking, and had a C compiler.
Funny side note... we had just watched Jurassic Park, which sparked a conversation with my dad about Unix. Dad mentioned that Linux was like Unix and was free. I had no idea Linux (or Unix) was a thing until this conversation, but I had to check it out. When I discovered that it had a C compiler... I was absolutely hooked.
This was such a pivotal moment in my life and was a major contributor to my eventually becoming a professional programmer.
Great. Another article on old Linux distributions that's just the same crap as in all the others.
FYI the first picture, the one with the 0.12 boot & root floppies that is in every old Linux distro article, is the original distribution made by Linus Torvalds himself. Two releases later, 0.95a (3/17/1992), Jim Winstead started doing the root floppy. H.J. Lu's "bootable root disk" came shortly afterwards. (9/23/1992)
When you see an article with that picture labeled as H.J. Lu's boot/root floppies, just stop reading.
I discovered linux through a couple of books (mostly about security) in 2008/2009. Then I downloaded linux mint (The gnome version). The only thing I recalled is how beautiful it was, all grey instead of the light beige and green of Windows XP. It felt like soft rubber button and XP felt like the clicky ones. And so many options. I spent days customizing KDE
I was an edgy teenager and wanted to use something different my friends were using so I asked my even more edgy friend how to start with Linux and he pointed me towards Slackware or Gentoo. That was back in 2003 I believe. I also remember being enamored with KDE.
I'm not trolling. Thats exactly how I got into Linux and later other flavors of Unix like BSD and Solaris. Fast forward and that silly teenager angst paved the way to my whole career.
PS: my even more edgy friend is still very edgy though he also became a father and a successful engineer.
I was at TAMU from 1995 to 1999, and ran either RedHat or Slackware. In the CS department where I worked part time it was all Solaris. Never heard of this TAMU distribution, but I would have been interested in helping to revive it if I had. Oh well!
I had TAMU as my first system, in 1993 I think. I didn't have a very effective internet connection but managed to get a copy on a pile of floppies. After that, I maintained it for years by hand by updating from individual source packages (I remember the upgrade to ELF being quite painful).
I installed SLS. It took me all night to get the modelines right for 1024x768@8 bits. On one side, my how far things have come. On the other, why’s it so hard to get hotplug thunderbolt working. :)
Crazy how much old software had ties to universities ( tamu Linux, BSD, wuftpd ). Are there any modern examples of this or have universities gotten out of the software game
It was an era of 80s software (msdos, etc) being run on 90s hardware, and the 90s hardware provided capabilities generations beyond what the software typically used. So you'd boot single task single user non-networked msdos to run a text mode eprom programmer, but that was done on early 90s hardware that could easily run multitasking, multiuser, networked GUI linux if you'd bother to install it.
Meanwhile the uni got huge donations of hardware and software licenses from now legacy unix providers. The senior EE students would do VLSI design on sunos workstations (sunos was from the oldest versions of solaris pizza box era back when Sun made hardware). Well, if my 386 desktop is 50 times faster and four times the memory of the sunos workstation, why do they have all this fabulous OS and application software and I'm stuck on singletasking msdos or sometimes windows3.11 works and sometimes it doesn't? Why not do TCP/IP and fancy GUIs on linux using the same hardware?
My guess is that university culture changed a lot over the last couple of decades, as well as the mainstream perception of computing technology and the Internet shifting from a neat science fiction type thing that some of us dreamed about to being completely ubiquitous.
Most of the technology that powered the Internet in some form or another came out of the Universities prior to the dot-com boom. If you wanted to do something interesting with computers and networks on a scale that mattered, academia was really your only option. (Yes there were BBSes and AOL, and dial-up Internet in most areas. But in terms of what you could do, those were like driving a golf cart on the autobahn.)
Now that the Internet is everywhere and programming as a career path is seemingly as popular as nursing or construction, the direction if the Internet is largely being determined by large companies and governments, not the people (or even the type of people) who built it. I suspect university CS departments probably lost that "wacky misfit club" atmosphere a long time ago. I'm sure the insane-and-rising cost of higher education isn't helping things out either.
All that said, lots of Universities do still provide material support for open source software in the form of hosting and mirrors. For example, around half of all Ubuntu and Debian mirrors are universities. The OSU open source lab hosts infrastructure for a variety of projects.
I also feel like we can "blame" Github here, since it (and a few other sites/projects like it) have become the de facto place to host source code and collaboration tools. (Whereas in the past it would have been an FTP/HTTP site and a mailing list.)
> I also feel like we can "blame" Github here, since it (and a few other sites/projects like it) have become the de facto place to host source code and collaboration tools. (Whereas in the past it would have been an FTP/HTTP site and a mailing list.)
Honestly, SourceForge did it first. GitHub just picked off where SF left off.
My first moments with BSD Unix as a college freshman were helped along by a group of four or five upperclassmen (juniors or seniors) who were at the computer center at the same odd hours as my friends and I.
One of them created the Yggdrasil Linux distribution a couple of years later.
Ironically, none of us had PCs to try it out. Those of us who had been able to afford a computer in college generally got a Macintosh. I couldn’t afford one, so I got a job instead.
I was there, and I don't recall that. It all "just worked" in the summer of 93 which was mere months after this article. On a 40 mhz 386dx, a kernel recompile took about an hour with 4 megs of ram so I upgraded to 5 megs using 4 256K sticks (back then simms were 8 bits wide and the 386 had a 32 bit bus, so ...) and then compile times dropped to 15 minutes. X window system worked fine IIRC.
The big problem with SLS is the distribution method was zipped floppy disk images downloaded from BBSes that were basically split up tar files. So the only update mechanism to fix a minor corner of the X window system would be to redownload all the "X" series disk images, then do a complete reinstall of the X window system.
IIRC the A series of floppy disks was about three disks and would boot and do nothing, but it did verify your hardware worked with linux so it was a natural starting point. The B series installed a "complete unix CLI environment" and the C series installed the compilers although you needed to install the K series to get the kernel source. In those days I believe we did not have modules yet so I had to recompile to get the mitsumi proprietary "not quite IDE" cdrom driver, or at least if we had modules nobody distributed that module in compiled format. Also in the pre-PCI era we set our ports and IRQs manually and it was possible at boot to override but most people recompiled their kernel to their local soundblaster sound card settings or whatever. I believe there might have been a T series of floppies which installed TCL/TK.
The superb innovation of Debian was once you got it installed and you connected to the internet you could download deb files and upgrade, perhaps, just perl. Or you could install, perhaps, just the gawk implementation of awk. About half a decade later came apt and you could now upgrade "automatically" over the internet which seemed quite magical at the time.
A big part of Debian in the old days was all FOSS license so its safe to use at work, and the universal OS "everything should be possible" kind of the opposite of the modern debian systemd era "theres only one way we will let you compute, and you'll like it or leave". I don't recall any claims of being bug free or less bugs at all; if anything debian was worse LOL.
It was not clear until the APT era that binary distribution was the way to do linux. In the "old days" if you wanted a fancy irc client you simply ftp downloaded the source and tar -xzf whatever.tar.gz ; make ; make install ; make clean it and it worked quite well.
Update:
WOW! I didn't know that Wine developement was already active in 1994! Somehow I had assumed it had started after Windows 95, however I just stumbled on this FAQ from 1994, mindblowing: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/sunsi...
Tsx11 was Ted Tso's MIT Linux site. Sunsite was unc (University of North Carolina). There was also funet in Finland (close to Linus). Those were the hot Linux sites back then.
Back in the early 90s I purchased CD-ROMs that were nothing more than archives of tsx11 and sunsite. It was much nicer for large files than downloading with a 28.8kbps modem.
My first distribution was DLD ("Deutsche Linux Distribution", started already in 1992). The distribution came with a softcover manual that described everything from compiling your own kernel to setting up your own webserver etc. Delix, the company behind it, was later sold to Redhat.
I used hjlu first, then mcc and then sls. I think. Never encountered TAMU, didn't try Yggdrasil. I think I ended using SLS longest. Most of this downloaded first with a 1200 baud and then 9600 baud modem. Vague recollection anyways. 486/50, 8MB RAM, 200MB drive. Memories.
I tried both Yggdrasil and SLS in 1993 when I was still in grad school, ran SLS for a while on my 386 PC (with no floating point). Lots of floppies and slow downloads in those days.
Bit off topic, but Lunduke is a racism denier. It's hard for me take anything he says seriously when he just completely denies the existence of systemic racism.
I remember him beating to death the horse that was "social justice warriors taking over our open source projects" and I stopped following his youtube around that time (I think it was 2017?)
Systemic - to me at least - means it's a matter of law, thus it affects everyone. I prefer to think of today's instances of racism as an individual/collective (by collective, I don't mean LARGE numbers necessarily) occurrences, rather than systemic. Assuming you aren't looking for perfection - which means no racist thought/word/deed in anyone in the USA - including non-whites who can also be very racist, fyi - then I'd say racism is on the whole pretty rare.
On the other hand, I do believe mental slavery is more prevalent than individual/collective racism :).
Looking back, I sometimes think. "How could you have been so into computers and NOT known about this???" Then I remember. Information just didn't travel as freely in those days. It was simply possible not to know things. Even though I read computer magazines, they were VERY focused on Windows or Mac. Once I found a distro I could install from floppies (Dragon Linux I think) I messed around until I got X running. Then it was CD-ROMs from CheapBytes and LinuxMall. In 1998 and 1999 I bet I installed every distro one could buy for 2 dollars on CD-ROM! I was a full time user. I have been ever since.