[HN Gopher] The Linux Distributions of 1992
___________________________________________________________________
The Linux Distributions of 1992
Author : WoodenChair
Score : 178 points
Date : 2021-09-16 15:18 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lunduke.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lunduke.substack.com)
| codezero wrote:
| I think I still have my Slackware 1.0 CD in a closet back at home
| from around 1993/94.
|
| I went on to work at Red Hat in 1999, those were fun times for
| Linux :)
| jmclnx wrote:
| If it is really 1.0, you should post it in Linux Questions
|
| http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/
|
| people there have been looking for a 1.0 set. I think the
| earliest one found so far was 1.01
| codezero wrote:
| If it's rare, I doubt it's 1.0 then, but I'll check :)
| [deleted]
| richard_todd wrote:
| 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!
| not2b wrote:
| 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.
| sprucely wrote:
| 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.
| 10GBps wrote:
| I remember it but it was no competition to VMware which I had
| been a user of since 1999.
| hulitu wrote:
| Yes. Win4linux was the best way to run windows in linux for
| games back then. Even better than the real thing. It was better
| than vmware.
| squarefoot wrote:
| 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.
| mongol wrote:
| Can't say I appreciated the suggested soundtrack.
| butterisgood wrote:
| (Just a pile of self-indulgent reminiscing)
|
| 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.
| davidw wrote:
| 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.
| fisian wrote:
| There is also this wikimedia illustration of the history of
| distributions.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Di...
| flyinghamster wrote:
| 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.
|
| On the InfoMagic set, there were:
|
| * Disk 1: Slackware 3.0 and Debian 0.93R6
|
| * Disk 2: Red Hat 3.0.3
|
| * Disk 3: Sunsite Archive
|
| * Disk 4: GNU and Kernel Sources
|
| * Disk 5: tsx-11 Archive
|
| * Disk 6: Demos and Red Hat for Alpha
| dleslie wrote:
| My first Linux was an early Slackware that came in a CD along
| with the book "Using Linux"
|
| I've placed an iso on archive:
|
| https://archive.org/details/UsingLinux
| minitoar wrote:
| 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.
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| You might be right (I don't really know for sure), but this is
| an ad hominem fallacy, which is probably why it's getting
| downvoted.
| minitoar wrote:
| I disagree it's an ad hominem fallacy. I'm judging him on his
| opinions and what he writes. I'm not surprised about the
| downvotes.
| edgyquant wrote:
| 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?)
|
| That said it's kind of irrelevant to the topic.
| lholden wrote:
| 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.
| nobleach wrote:
| 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.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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...
| jmclnx wrote:
| I remember this :)
|
| 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.
| unmole wrote:
| > Linux fans as, well, bizarre sometimes arrogant pseudo
| programmers.
|
| To be fair, some of us were smug as hell.
|
| I once picked an argument with a guy simply because he was
| wearing a Microsoft t-shirt.
| allenu wrote:
| Ah, in those days I remember friends referred to Microsoft
| as The Evil Empire.
|
| I think there was also a little bit of "friendly" debate
| over the superior OS at the time. (I ran OS/2 Warp for a
| number of years myself.)
| techrat wrote:
| Oh the days of being on Slashdot and getting downmodded
| to -1 Troll because you _dare_ to suggest that Windows is
| a usable 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_...
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Unfortunately this trend continues in the Linux Desktop
| community. It seems it never outgrew its teenager mindset.
| techrat wrote:
| 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 for 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.
| wolfi1 wrote:
| I never got used to Excel, most of the spreadsheet things
| Excel is used for can be achieved by awk
| jmclnx wrote:
| I do not know why you got down voted for this.
|
| But same here, I never used Excel (and do not now) because
| the tools in UNIX type OSs are fine.
|
| So I guess I will be joining you in the basement :)
| int_19h wrote:
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| deaddodo wrote:
| 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.
| mssdvd wrote:
| They work fine only for SD contents. There are hacks that
| enable FullHD streams but they work only for Netflix.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Heck, I'd even pay for it!_
|
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| I've always wondered why no Linux app store has risen to
| prominence? Can one make a living selling their Linux
| applications to end users?
| dharmab wrote:
| > Can one make a living selling their Linux applications
| to end users?
|
| There are companies that do this- DaVinci Resolve,
| IntelliJ IDEA, Ardour come to mind.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| 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.
| opencl wrote:
| 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.
| chronogram wrote:
| 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.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| 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.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| tomrod wrote:
| MS really needs to release a Linux Excel.
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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...
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Once they have ported it to Electron ...
| orangepurple wrote:
| Microsoft _is_ mostly reduced to the Office and Cloud
| teams. It 's likely why the Windows UI is an inconsistent
| disaster.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| earksiinni wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Wild times.
|
| [1]: https://www.mobygames.com/company/aztech-new-media-corp
| 13of40 wrote:
| 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.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| 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.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| 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?".
| dharmab wrote:
| The most single life-changing purchase of my life was probably
| a Linux magazine that included an Ubuntu DVD from the
| bookstore.
| dkarl wrote:
| 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.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| 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...
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| 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.
| dwater wrote:
| 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.
| jasperry wrote:
| 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...
| kar1181 wrote:
| 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.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| 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.
| nescioquid wrote:
| > 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.
| terrywang wrote:
| 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...).
| anezch wrote:
| 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.
| abotsis wrote:
| 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.
| :)
| skydhash wrote:
| 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
| ulzeraj wrote:
| 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.
| 3dbrows wrote:
| 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 PS1 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.
| 6581 wrote:
| 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.
| tristor wrote:
| 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.
| heurisko wrote:
| In my eyes, it was the introduction of WiFi and home routers that
| made Linux-based systems accessible to home users.
|
| Prior to that, I remember having a lot of issues with "soft
| modems" that required Windows drivers to work.
|
| WiFi allowed me to move to RedHat, then Ubuntu, full time.
| icedchai wrote:
| 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.
| SemiNormal wrote:
| My first was Slackware. Back when they would mail you a CD of
| the distro for free.
| sillystuff wrote:
| Wish I had known about that back then. I spent hours in a 24
| hour access university computer lab, one night in '93,
| downloading Slack to floppies.
|
| Never looked back. '93 was the year of the GNU/Linux desktop
| for me.
| ansible wrote:
| 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.
| icedchai wrote:
| I also used Coherent for a bit. Its documentation was
| excellent! I remember the book with the shell on the cover:
| http://gunkies.org/wiki/File:Coherent_4_print_ad.jpg
| dim13 wrote:
| Really surprised to see The Gimp in 1992 ... full 6 years before
| its initial conception.
| fit2rule wrote:
| Yggdrasil OG in the house. I still have 40-odd floppies around,
| was a great day they shipped a bootable CD that went straight to
| X if you had the right hardware .. that blew a lot of our minds,
| back then ..
| VLM wrote:
| "Because of the general bugginess of SLS"
|
| 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.
| fmakunbound wrote:
| 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!
| oflebbe wrote:
| 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.
| p_l wrote:
| 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...
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| icedchai wrote:
| 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?
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| 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.
| quakeguy wrote:
| Yggdrasil was indeed the best name ever for a distro...
| pvitz wrote:
| 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.
| wiz21c wrote:
| I think I remember that I started with something called TSX11 /
| SunSite... Is there any HN'ers who see what that was ?
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| 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.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| 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.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| > TSX11
|
| Could it be tsx-11.mit.edu?
|
| There's a (partial) mirror of that FTP site in 1996 here:
| https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/tsx-...
|
| As for SunSite, ibiblio also hosts
| https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/suns...
| although I think that was a more popular name? A floppy
| distribution of Linux that I used around 2000 was hosted on
| sunsite.dk
| https://web.archive.org/web/20010127161100/http://sunsite.dk...
|
| 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...
| mindcrime wrote:
| Not sure about TSX11, but there was a sunsite.unc.edu site back
| in the day, and they hosted Linux images (and lots of other
| F/OSS stuff).
|
| https://www.ibiblio.org/index.old/yeoldindex.html
| anonymousiam wrote:
| 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.
| rel2thr wrote:
| 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
| cogman10 wrote:
| I think it's more the case that the linux ecosystem has gotten
| too complex for a university student or professor to wrangle on
| their own.
| bityard wrote:
| 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.)
| VLM wrote:
| 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?
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