[HN Gopher] The early days of Linux
___________________________________________________________________
The early days of Linux
Author : Paul-Craft
Score : 727 points
Date : 2023-04-13 16:19 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| mnw21cam wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Linus used Doom to stress-test the memory-
| management, not Quake. I have had a quote in my stash for ages:
| I've run DOOM more in the last few days than I have the last few
| months. I just love debugging ;-) -- Linus Torvalds
| rightbyte wrote:
| ";-)"
|
| It looks so strange with the nose nowadays. But that was how
| people did it if I remember correctly.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| I always used the nose even when my friends used noseless
| emoticons as the latter look like squished faces to me :-P
| mwcremer wrote:
| Huh! I always read that as sticking out one's tongue.
| eyko wrote:
| It is!
| kelnos wrote:
| The tongue was 'P'. Either ;P or ;-P (or :P or :-P).
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I still like to do these: :^) -- with a nose that looks like,
| well, a nose, *<:^) -- with a beanie hat, Zh:^) -- with
| unkempt hair.
|
| Emojis bring some expression, but they take some away, too.
| usefulcat wrote:
| This is correct; it was definitely doom in 93-94. I remember
| playing it then, and it was brand new at that time.
| ttttyyyyyyyy wrote:
| [flagged]
| gabereiser wrote:
| This is great. A few years later I would stumble upon this new
| operating system. I was hooked. I spent all my time tinkering
| with it, building with it, so much so that I ignored the outside
| world around me. Case in point, me, ignoring the world around me
| [1]. I was maybe 13 at the time. 1996 I think. Man, the wonder of
| the unknown and the potential of the future... :D
|
| [1]: https://pasteboard.co/yOQrjCR8OsZh.jpg
| mhh__ wrote:
| This git tutorial from 2005ish is interesting
|
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/927a503cd07718ea0f...
| coldpie wrote:
| Looks like this eventually became gitcore-tutorial, which still
| ships with Git today.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| How source control used to be done:
|
| >> the students shared a source tree over NFS and shouted "I'm
| editing this file" when they were changing something
| bla3 wrote:
| Tangential, but it's kind of pleasing that Lars WirzeNius is
| writing an article for lwn.net.
| braindead_in wrote:
| I wonder if some day someone will write a similar story about
| early days of LLMs.
| linhns wrote:
| "Engineering prompts in a maddening fashion so that it works
| the way I want it to be.". This sentence should be in that
| article
| jjice wrote:
| If you're interested in Linux history, check out Just For Fun by
| Linus Torvalds himself. It's written in 1999 if I recall, which
| is so much closer to Linux's inception than it is to today, so
| it's so interesting to hear thoughts and predictions about Linux
| at the time.
|
| Super cheap book. I think I got my copy for $4 on ebay.
| ndesaulniers wrote:
| Linus signed my copy!
| oblio wrote:
| For a more generic FOSS perspective,
| https://www.amazon.com/Rebel-Code-Linux-Source-Revolution/dp...
| is a very nice read.
|
| Cristi Vlasceanu, if you're around, many thanks for the books.
| The OS one I gave to a Poli student that was very passionate
| about OSes.
| BanazirGalbasi wrote:
| I found this book in my local library when I was in college, it
| was a really fun read. I had recently finished the OS course
| which used PintOS[1] and wanted to learn more about the
| development process. Unfortunately my C is still fairly
| rudimentary, and at this point it's going to be a bit longer
| before I attempt to follow Linus's path.
|
| 1: https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-
| bin/cs140-spring20/pint...
| nik_0_0 wrote:
| +1 - Finished reading it this year, very fun read and much in
| the same vein as this article.
| js2 wrote:
| Circa 1996 I was getting my CS degree. At the same time, I got a
| job at a small local company running an ISP on the side. A dozen
| Hayes modems hooked up to a Livingston Portmaster. T1 uplink. And
| two PCs (named "hops" and "barley") running Slackware. That was
| my first experience with Linux. It was a barbaric OS compared to
| the Unix workstations we had in the CS department running HP/UX
| and SunOS. But it had promise...
|
| I think my first open source contribution was while working there
| (I added the "-e" switch to chpasswd) and it's still part of
| Linux today. Let's see... found it:
|
| https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow/blob/master/NEWS#L178...
| icedchai wrote:
| SunOS was also pretty bare bones, if I remember correctly. CS
| departments had to install a ton of 3rd party software to give
| you a usable system.
| js2 wrote:
| Yes, absolutely. But it was solid Unix OS with excellent
| documentation. I also worked for the CS department. We
| installed software centrally to an NFS server which was then
| automounted. We used something called "depot" from CMU to
| setup a software depot:
|
| https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=82134.
| ..
|
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/.cs.cmu.edu/help/content/unix_lin.
| ..
|
| The biggest PITA about this scheme at the time was that you
| wanted "make install" to put software in one location
| (/depot/...), but you wanted that software to have paths
| compiled in as if it were in a different location
| (/usr/local/...). For the most part, the Makefiles that came
| with open source software then just weren't designed that
| way. You could set PREFIX but it was used for both the
| compiled-in paths as well as where "make install" put things.
| I recall spending a lot of time wrestling things into the
| depot scheme.
|
| Seems absurdly over-engineered looking at it now.
|
| Later in my career, I spent a lot of time building RPMs which
| was similarly painful but got easier over time.
|
| Software packaging... fun times.
| capableweb wrote:
| This article is a goldmine of old, classic stuff and lots of
| information I have not yet read. Great read and nice of the
| author to share the experience, I hope people with these kind of
| experiences continue to share their subjective views on history.
|
| Unrelated but fun highlight from the mentioned newsletter:
|
| > Linux News #3
|
| > Issue #3, October 18 through 26, 1992
|
| > ** Highlights in this issue
|
| > - ed is here, editor wars are over
| nickdothutton wrote:
| I first installed Linux in secret on a spare partition of a
| Windows 386 at University. It was 1994, and for a while it was
| like having my own workstation, normally the Suns and VAXstations
| were reserved for the Post Docs and researchers. Because PCs were
| in abundance and both Sun and VMS systems restricted and tightly
| controlled, many of us setup home on that PC. It was anarchy.
| bitwize wrote:
| As an earlyish (1995) Linux adopter I'd heard some of these
| tales, like the fact that it started as a simple task scheduler
| that wrote a's and b's to the screen. But it's cool to hear it
| from someone who was actually there to witness those early events
| as they unfolded.
| davidthewatson wrote:
| I found this article resplendent because Linux has given back to
| me what I put into it year after year since it launched the year
| I graduated college.
|
| What I wonder is this: is there a story happening now that has
| similar good will for the future of AI without having commercial
| or social computing as its basis?
|
| The reason I love Linux is that Linus started and finished before
| commercial and social concerns became the raison d'etre in
| software.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Commercial concerns were also the raison d'etre in software
| before and during the time Linus was creating Linux, too.
| jcadam wrote:
| I remember downloading Slackware floppy images from a local BBS
| the first time I wanted to try Linux. Good times.
| kyaghmour wrote:
| I can't find the article anymore (and I've looked for it several
| times in the past) but someone was making the point that open
| source was essentially an economic phenomenon. Insofar as
| distribution costs went to zero with the advent of mass-access to
| the internet then it was inevitable that people would start
| sharing software. Obviously this takes nothing away from all
| those early contributors, but it is food for thought.
|
| Mind you while Linux was taking off the BSDs were apparently busy
| in lawsuits. So, while the zeroing of distribution costs
| should've benefited them, it seems Linux was at the right place
| at the right time, minus the baggage.
| retrac wrote:
| The "Net" in NetBSD (the first open source BSD community to
| coalesce after the lawsuits settled) refers to that, it's the
| _network_ operating system. And not really in the sense of an
| OS for networks (though it certainly is that) but one _from_
| and _of_ the network.
| toyg wrote:
| The problem with BSDs was not much the lawsuits but the fact
| that they didn't figure out a governance model that could
| scale. Linux had open mailing lists and low barriers to entry,
| BSDs had "core" cliques. Linux begat git, a distributed VCS,
| when BSDs were happy with the likes of CVS, where control is
| rigidly centralized. Etc etc.
| [deleted]
| cesarb wrote:
| > Mind you while Linux was taking off the BSDs were apparently
| busy in lawsuits. So, while the zeroing of distribution costs
| should've benefited them, it seems Linux was at the right place
| at the right time, minus the baggage.
|
| There were other reasons. Reusing an older comment of mine
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32372063):
|
| My favorite theory for why Linux got a head start is in this
| (long) comment I found some time ago here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21420338
|
| Some excerpts:
|
| "With Linux, I just booted from a Linux boot floppy with my
| Linux install CD in the CD-ROM drive, and ran the installation.
| With BSD...it could not find the drive because I had an IDE CD-
| ROM and it only supported SCSI."
|
| "It insisted on being given a disk upon which it could
| completely repartition. [...] Linux, on the other hand, was
| happy to come second after my existing DOS/Windows."
|
| "By the time the BSD people realized they really should be
| supporting IDE CD-ROM and get along with prior DOS/Windows on
| the same disk, Linux was way ahead."
| toyg wrote:
| That was a failure of governance, which was a result of their
| failure to have an open development model. Linus was very
| liberal in accepting help from hobbyists and uncredentialed
| people (people who were hardware-poor, and hence needed
| support for stuff like dual-booting...), the BSD world has
| always been more opaque and closed.
|
| In a way it was a victory of horizontal, open, "upstart"
| governance, versus aristocratic and elitist organization.
| bluedino wrote:
| BSD was Unix people used to workstations hardware so that's
| what they targeted on the PC. Linux was PC people who wanted
| it to run on whatever cheap hardware they had
| bcantrill wrote:
| I don't know that you were necessarily thinking of this, but I
| did write a piece on exactly this in 2004.[0][1] I couldn't
| really find anything else at the time that was talking about
| this, so if you did/do find something else, I would love to
| read it!
|
| [0] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-
| soft...
|
| [1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/12/16/the-economics-of-
| soft...
| GoofballJones wrote:
| I began tinkering with Linux about 6 months after it's inception.
| I think....think...it was what became Slackware in what I
| gathered up the things to make it run on my Micron Pentium.
|
| This was in the day I was trying everything on that machine. I
| had DOS running on it at one point, then OS/2 Warp, then Windows
| 3.1, then Linux, then back to OS/2 etc etc. It was at a time
| where everything was up in the air, before Windows 95 took a
| major foothold.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _This was in the day I was trying everything on that machine. I
| had DOS running on it at one point, then OS /2 Warp, then
| Windows 3.1, then Linux, then back to OS/2 etc etc._
|
| Heh. I remember trying one time to get as many different OS's
| multi-booting on one physical box as I could. I think I had
| about 5 at one point, something like Windows 95, OS/2, Red Hat
| 6.2, FreeBSD (or maybe OpenBSD), Caldera Linux, and maybe
| something else. And then I tried to add one more (I think it
| was Solaris x86) and totally hosed everything and had to start
| over.
|
| Definitely the "good ole days". :-)
| freedomben wrote:
| What a great sense of humor this author has! I literally lol'ed
| at some of these jokes. It's hard to make humor shine through
| writing, so I'm double impressed.
|
| Some of the best, but don't deprive yourself of the whole article
| (because it's a gem):
|
| > _More importantly for the future success of Linux was that the
| X11 system was ported to it, making 1992 the year of the Linux
| desktop._
|
| > _Thus, mine was the first PC where Linux was ever installed.
| While this was happening, I was taking a nap, and I recommend
| this method of installing Linux: napping, while Linus does the
| hard work._
|
| > _A couple of years later, he spent days playing Quake,
| ostensibly to stress-test kernel memory management, although that
| was with a newer PC. Much fun was had in that room, and there
| were no pranks whatsoever. None at all._
|
| > _Alas, early Linux networking code was occasionally a little
| rough, having been written from scratch. At one point, Linux
| would send some broken packets that took down all of the Sun
| machines on the network. As it was difficult to get the Sun
| kernel fixed, Linux was banned from the university network until
| its bug was fixed. Not having Usenet access from one 's desk is a
| great motivator._
|
| > _In the spring of 1994 we felt that Linux was done. Finished.
| Nothing more to add. One could use Linux to compile itself, to
| read Usenet, and run many copies of the xeyes program at once. We
| decided to release version 1.0 and arranged a release event._
|
| > _I insisted that a version-control system be used. I had
| witnessed students in earlier courses do the shouting kind of
| version control: the students shared a source tree over NFS and
| shouted "I'm editing this file" when they were changing
| something. This did not seem like an effective method to me, so I
| insisted on CVS, _
|
| > _In 1997 Linus graduated and moved to the US to take a job at
| Transmeta. I took a job at a different university in the Helsinki
| area. In the following years, many things happened. It turned out
| that there were still a few missing features from Linux, so
| people worked on those._
|
| > _The term "open source" was coined and IBM invested a ton of
| money in Linux development. Netscape published a version of its
| web browser as open source. Skipping a few details and many
| years, open source basically took over the world. LWN was started
| and covered much of this history on a week-by-week basis._
| chucknthem wrote:
| The 2nd part of the CVS section was funny too "[...] This
| experience is why Linus dislikes CVS and for years refused to
| use any version control beyond uploading tar balls to FTP
| sites."
|
| It's deadpan humor in written form.
| kebman wrote:
| Very Finnish humour:
|
| "I recommend this method of installing Linux: napping, while
| Linus does the hard work."
|
| Kippis, folks!
| kevsamuel wrote:
| LWN is consistently good, I really should subscribe.
| eamonnsullivan wrote:
| Great read. The first distribution I used was TAMU
| (https://archiveos.org/tamu/) in 1992, when Linux wasn't yet at
| 1.0. I had to download dozens of floppy disk images. In those
| days, getting X to run involved real risk. Get some of the
| parameters wrong and you could destroy your monitor. My five kids
| (all in their 20s and 30s now) grew up running Linux. It's still
| the OS I choose when the option is available.
| incanus77 wrote:
| Same here for RH 5.1 in '98. I spent most of a summer messing
| around with trying to get the proper video modes working on my
| graphics card and learning the ins and outs of X configuration.
| Then came the sound card...
| MilStdJunkie wrote:
| That was still a thing in 1998, when I got saddled with
| supporting the Slack boxes. Perspiration!
| sillystuff wrote:
| > X to run involved real risk. Get some of the parameters wrong
| and you could destroy your monitor.
|
| The flexibility also allowed you to accomplish neat things.
|
| I was spoiled by high res 21" workstation monitors at school,
| so my laptop with a 640 x 480 screen was very limiting. But,
| telling X that the LCD was a multiscan monitor made every other
| scan line go to /dev/null-- the effect was a pseudo-resolution
| of 640x960 with scrunched up, but very readable fonts. Ran that
| setup for years.
| kyaghmour wrote:
| Some friends told me they ran into Andrew Tannenbaum at Embedded
| World a few years ago and asked him if he still believed that
| Minix was better than Linux. Apparently he said yes.
|
| DISCLAIMER: 2nd hand story.
| guenthert wrote:
| Better for what? Tannenbaum is an educator and Minix an
| educational tool. It is arguably the better tool to teach
| operating systems.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Leaving aside which OS is "better", if you have an Intel
| processor you are very likely running Minix right now!
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=What+Intel+firmware+contains...
| cwillu wrote:
| If I routinely had strangers coming up to me picking arguments
| about something argument I made decades before (always the same
| thing), I'd pretty quickly come up with the minimum necessary
| reply to end the interaction as well.
| earthscienceman wrote:
| I absolutely love articles like this that humanize the creation
| of such a megalithic thing. It was just someone who was curious
| enough to tinker for a while on a project who was hanging out
| with friends. I love it.
|
| I think it would be hard to overstate the impact of Linux and
| free software. I do climate science research and its pretty
| obvious that every single paper that contains an important
| finding was built on FOSS. Latex, Linux, python, all the gnu
| tools, and so much more. Imagine being a researcher who needed to
| write any of that, or pay for all of that, in order to work. It's
| incredible. Thanks to everyone who codes, builds, or contributes
| to such projects.
|
| Also, it's laughable how little that is recognized in the science
| community.
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| This & open source give me hope in humankind. Almost drop a
| tear reading the article.
| ForRealsies wrote:
| [dead]
| asciii wrote:
| > It was just someone who was curious enough to tinker for a
| while on a project who was hanging out with friends.
|
| The modern world is underpinned by such discoveries--very
| accidental or curious types that go on to change the world and
| impact a lot of people.
|
| To quote a Steve Job's line: "I love and admire my species,
| living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life
| and well-being" [0]
|
| [0]: https://putsomethingback.stevejobsarchive.com/
| earthscienceman wrote:
| Absolutely. But also, as a species, we're such a fan of these
| narratives that lionize people like Steve jobs. A brief
| article written by a friend about a project from their
| college years is much more humanizing than anything I've read
| about Steve Jobs. Sure, there's the "garage beginnings" part
| of the story but even that is very much lionized as "grind
| and hustle".
|
| I think the way the myth of Steve Jobs and his impact on the
| world is a great example to juxtapose against Linus\Linux in
| so many ways. Linux runs nearly everything and was given away
| for free and the broader public is totally unaware. Steve
| Jobs sells hardware and constantly played up the lion
| narrative as a push to make money and be important. Im more
| interested in the former than the lot.
|
| Inflammatory comment? Maybe. But I think we need to shift the
| values that we collectively encourage and this article is
| fantastic.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > But I think we need to shift the values that we
| collectively encourage and this article is fantastic.
|
| Thank you for expressing that, I agree wholeheartedly.
| There's this increasing sentiment that _everything_ is a
| product - something many people on HN are responsible for
| promoting. Where once was humility, there 's now
| opportunism: Terminal emulator? Meet subscription service.
| In an industry defined by it's ability to generate hype
| cycles and profit off them, there's something brilliant and
| refreshing about FOSS and it's culture.
|
| Steve Jobs got the private jet and the flashy keynotes, but
| Linus Torvalds is undoubtedly the bigger rockstar.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Same with Woz, the actual brains behind Apple. Jobs was
| just a charismatic designer and salesman.
| riceart wrote:
| Woz had nothing to do with saving Apple in the 90s - and
| nothing for nearly 40 years - the _only_ reason we talk
| about Apple today at all is because of Jobs and the small
| group he supported himself with in the late 90s. He was
| clearly smart enough to figure out how to save Apple.
| That's more than "just" being a designer. 3 predecessors
| couldn't figure it out and Gil Amelio wasn't an idiot
| (Spindler wasn't an idiot either - but oof talk about
| being out of your element)
|
| The Apple of Wozniak is a historical footnote. Apple of
| today is NeXT - Jobs' company.
|
| A company doesn't just succeed on technical prowess which
| is more where Woz's skills lay. Trying to decide which
| one of them is more intelligent is pointless. Steve Jobs
| was smarter than the majority of the commenters here
| IMHO.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > the only reason we talk about Apple today at all is
| because of Jobs and the small group he supported himself
| with
|
| It's fair to say _that_ success can be attributed to the
| Apple II, which without Woz wouldn 't exist. Yes, he did
| not make the iPod - but he bolstered Steve when his
| technical council was empty and was content doing so for
| next-to-nothing. There's no need to belittle his actions,
| obviously nothing he did competed with the work Jobs was
| doing. The two operated in their own lanes.
|
| > Trying to decide which one of them is more intelligent
| is pointless.
|
| > Steve Jobs was smarter than the majority of the
| commenters here IMHO.
|
| If it doesn't matter, you probably shouldn't punctuate
| your statement by reiterating how much it matters to you
| :p
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Steve Jobs was one of the greatest marketers in recent
| history, and from that perspective he really was "totally
| dependent on them for [his] life and well-being".
|
| Others did the work going from zero to one, he did the work
| of going from one to a hundred.
| oblio wrote:
| The first ones put in an infinity units of effort and
| received maybe N units of recognition for it.
|
| Jobs put in 100 units of effort and received N billion
| units of recognition for it.
| wwweston wrote:
| Jobs figured out how to collect and amplify the efforts
| of talented people into a industrial organization with
| products that have had a world-changing impact.
|
| I don't know how much of that is his talents and efforts
| and how much of that is luck of being with teams that
| succeeded at a time when industries he chose were rising.
| I wouldn't discount either the possibility that he was
| distinctly good and industrious... or that
| dozens/hundreds/thousands of people of equal
| distinctiveness didn't make it for arbitrary reasons. And
| anybody who isn't sure the rewards are equitably
| distributed is probably correct.
|
| But I do recognize that functioning in such a way that
| you can effectively collect and amplify the efforts of
| talented people is a non-trivial feat.
| earthscienceman wrote:
| While I do agree with you on the effort assessment, or
| certainly the "trailblazing" factor... (to me, writing a
| kernel and operating system that could be used by the
| entire world before there existed a notion of what that
| kernel and operating system might look do that is
| infinitely more impressive than being a salesman)
|
| .. I do think it's a red herring. To me it's not so much
| about effort than it is impact. If every person to ever
| write code was trying to sell a product, progress would
| have halted as it started. It's both the effort, the
| philosophy, and the philanthropy of it. Which is also
| what has made it thankless-ish.
| gordian-mind wrote:
| Popular recognition is usually balanced out by resentment
| and envy.
| oblio wrote:
| For Jobs? No way, that ratio is 100:1.
|
| The worst part is that he was a horrible human being.
| Much worse than Wozniak and probably even slightly worse
| than Gates.
| lb1lf wrote:
| >> One day, Linus accidentally attempted to use his hard drive
| to dial the university, resulting in his master boot sector
| starting with "ATDT" and the university modem-pool phone
| number. After recovering from this, he implemented file
| permissions in his kernel.
|
| Now this nugget made my day. I love Finnish deadpan humor.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Yes, but the "I recommend this installation method" bit is
| slightly better :)
| dekhn wrote:
| I've actually seen a rare case where a rebooting machine with
| messed up DMA tables managed to deliver incoming network
| packets to the hard drive, corrupting it. It took a bunch of
| really smart people a long time to figure that out.
| freedomben wrote:
| Everything is a file! :-D
| nicholasjarnold wrote:
| dropped by to comment the exact same thing. good ole' /dev/*.
| make sure you're sending bytes to the correct one!
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| It's also endearing that the Linux kernel was rooted in "A"/"B"
| testing. :)
| bertmuthalaly wrote:
| I love the crossover with the Prince of Persia, which was also an
| early computer labor of love.
| Votearome wrote:
| [flagged]
| Votearome wrote:
| [flagged]
| 7373737373 wrote:
| Interesting that they were aware of Plan9 from the beginning!
| kiss-o-matic wrote:
| [flagged]
| geoelkh wrote:
| awesome post!
| snvsn wrote:
| Linus describes this and more in his book - Just for Fun: The
| Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. Great read
| taylorportman wrote:
| Not to be a GNU/Linux instigator but I remember when I first read
| the GPL how strange it was to have a legal document to give
| something away it seemed like a impish prank - will someone take
| it and insist you stop giving it away, or sue you when their
| production line breaks down.. And then the flamewars began, the
| pronunciation, the toolchain, freetards, 'open sores', etc. but
| it was the GPL making it all possible.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| One big takeaway is how close the real Unix (in the form of
| 386BSD) came to being where Linux is today. If it had been
| available freely one year earlier, Linux wouldn't have gained
| momentum. Would it be better to have one true free Unix-like OS
| now, rather than two? Did the free-for-all development in Linux
| depend on it having no "pure" ancestry? Nobody knows.
| geocar wrote:
| > If it had been available freely one year earlier, Linux
| wouldn't have gained momentum.
|
| I doubt that. Real Unix was a pretty horrible experience for a
| lot of hobbyists starting right from the disklabel, and many of
| those smug bastards where pretty horrible people _to_
| hobbyists.
|
| The fact Linux worked on crap hardware meant people who could
| only afford crap hardware could learn it, and get good at it.
| Linux overtook Real Unix real fast in-terms of hardware support
| -- so fast I don't think *BSD ever stood a chance.
|
| Stability and quality is a double-edged sword: You think you
| gotta keep the crap out or it gets crap, but the reality is
| that crap is what makes it fun, and fun is why people used
| Linux and not Real Unix. If you want to make something great,
| you've got to do is focus on things that matter, and remember:
| fun matters more than scsi.
|
| > Would it be better to have one true free Unix-like OS now,
| rather than two? Did the free-for-all development in Linux
| depend on it having no "pure" ancestry? Nobody knows.
|
| Some people say "pure" and others say "inbred". I say this
| thing you're thinking about is a distraction: anything that
| prevents people from trying things out is slowing progress,
| there just ain't two ways around it.
|
| Worse is not better: It just means you don't know what's
| important. Better is better.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > In 1991, Linus wrote that Linux "won't be big and professional
| like gnu". In 2023. Linux is running on every continent, on every
| ocean, on billions of devices, in orbit, and on Mars.
|
| Amazing
| gumballindie wrote:
| Now _this_ is the kind of content that I crave for.
| noobcoder wrote:
| It's hella amazing to see how Linux has been used in so many
| different industries and applications, from chip design to web
| servers to personal computers and moree. It's a testament to the
| flexibility and power of the open-source model, and the ingenuity
| of the community that has built and maintained it over the years
| raarts wrote:
| I first downloaded Slackware in June '93. I needed 13 diskettes.
| Installed it on my Compaq 386/SX 4Mb laptop, and spent the rest
| of the year learning myself Linux.
|
| In November '93 I founded one of the first internet providers in
| The Netherlands, and I'm pretty certain my family was the first
| Dutch family that had always-on public internet from the home.
|
| Also I might have been one of the first companies in the NL to
| run Linux in a business-critical environment.
|
| Linux always kept me from running Windows on my desktop. Although
| I switched to the Mac in 2005 after big problems get multimedia
| And graphics to work reliably.
|
| Without Linux my life would have been completely different. It
| allowed me to create a new future for myself. So I'm hugely
| grateful for its existence.
| divbzero wrote:
| > During this time, late spring of 1991, I wrote an
| implementation of the C sprintf() function for [Linus Torvalds],
| as he hadn't yet learned how to write functions with variable
| argument lists. I wanted to spare him the pain of having a
| different function for every type of value to write out.
|
| That's such a cool detail. Everyone starts somewhere.
|
| ( _Shuffling off to commit change to Git and deploy to Linux..._
| )
| krossitalk wrote:
| > the X11 system was ported to it, making 1992 the year of the
| Linux desktop.
|
| That's rich!
| zomg wrote:
| I literally busted out laughing! We've been waiting all these
| years and... we missed it?!? xD
| fatnoah wrote:
| Wow, this brings me back to the crazy days of college in the fall
| of 1994. My roommates and I ran a mish-mosh of OSs, including
| Windows (3.11), OS/2, and Linux (Slackware distro). The last was
| certainly the biggest challenge, but once we had remote xterms to
| campus servers, there was no need to slog to a computer lab.
|
| I also remember the era of free access to things. I had an
| account on some Stanford systems "just in case I wanted to run
| some stuff". It was a totally different time.
| GoofballJones wrote:
| Yes, exactly. Around 1993-94 I was running through so many
| different OS's on my Micron Pentium. DOS, then OS/2 Warp, then
| Linux, then Windows 3.1, then back to OS/2, then to Linux.
| Drove my wife crazy.
| vmlinuz wrote:
| This article is a masterpiece of deadpan Nordic understatement!
| Also a good read...
| [deleted]
| philistine wrote:
| That joke about his preferred Linux installation method is
| _chef 's kiss_.
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| I really hope that in a sense today is still early days of Linux.
| What a beautiful software which taught me such a lot of things.
| bdcravens wrote:
| > The system was initially called Freax
|
| Maybe it's common knowledge, but first time I've heard that. I
| wonder how that would have impacted adoption if it had stuck?
| yubiox wrote:
| Then instead of the linnux and lynux pronunciation confusion
| we'd have freaks and free-ax.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| This audio is burned in my memory since I was configuring my
| SoundBlaster in Red Hat 5.2: https://youtu.be/c39QPDTDdXU
| jrussino wrote:
| This just made me realize that even though I pronounce
| Linux as "Lee-nux" (the same way he does), I always read
| _his_ name as "Lie-nus" (like the Charlie brown
| character).
| rightbyte wrote:
| His name is pronounced "Lee-nus" in Finnish so I guess it
| makes sense.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Perhaps it was meant to be pronounced like Free Ox, since an
| ox looks a bit like a gnu (wildebeest)
| yencabulator wrote:
| Quite unlikely:
|
| > The first releases of Linux used a license that forbade
| commercial use. Some of the early contributors suggested a
| change to a free-software license. In the fall of 1991,
| Richard Stallman visited Finland and I took Linus to a talk
| given by Stallman. This, the pressure from contributors,
| and my nagging eventually convinced Linus to choose the GNU
| GPL license instead, in early 1992.
| sneed_chucker wrote:
| Hard to say. "Unix" is pronounced like "eunuchs" and yet saw
| pretty wide adoption.
|
| Definitely in a different time and under other circumstances
| than Linux though.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Yoo-nicks rather than yoo-nucks surely?
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| They're both pronounced "Yoo-nicks"
| lproven wrote:
| They really are not, you know.
| housecarpenter wrote:
| Some accents don't distinguish those two vowels in
| unstressed positions.
| Laaas wrote:
| Unix: /'ju:nIks/
|
| Eunuch: /'ju:.n@k/
|
| Presumably the plural form retains the vowel, hence they
| are just a bit different.
| aap_ wrote:
| There's an anecdote that they answered the phone in the UNIX
| room with "eunuchs room" in a high pitched voice.
| meekaaku wrote:
| There is a quote somewhere that says Linus names his programs
| after himself. Freax for freak, and then later git too. Git
| means an unpleasant person.
| jll29 wrote:
| Thanks to Lars Wirzenius for sharing his first Linux (and Linus)
| memories.
|
| BTW, nowadays Lars teaches Rust using his own consultancy.
|
| I well remember (the younger me, a school kid) having to install
| 50 3.5" floppy disks FTP'd from the University of Karlsruhe's
| servers, only to discover that some where faulty & having to do
| it all over again. And then the reward of having the X11 logo and
| xeyes on your own desktop - 1992 was a fantastic year!
| newswasboring wrote:
| This has to be the funniest tech article I have ever read. I was
| literally laughing out loud. I don't even remember the last time
| I had such an emotional response to a tech article. Probably it
| was something by whytheluckystiff back in my teenage.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| There is almost a (probably misleading) glimmer of "i could
| have done that", because the story is so human, he really did
| have to learn assembly by printing A and Bs, he didn't have a
| grand design and just smash out an OS in vim and upload it!
| This is real agile programming.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| This is a great read of a humble start of history. The A..B
| concurrency printing, helping Linus out implementing Sprintf,
| learning assembly. Building it all towards a coherent system.
|
| What was truly profound is how Linux and other open source
| systems and libraries completely cracked open systems software
| for the masses. Back in the early 90s, everything around Unix,
| operating systems, compilers, tools, everything was crazy
| expensive to buy. And all of a sudden here came this thundering
| herd of code that was all completely free. Of course Gnu stuff
| had been around for awhile, but Linux is what propelled it into
| warp speed adoption. In thr 90s I was privileged to work at Bear
| Stearns and had a Sparc Station on my desk and regular
| interactions with SunOS, Solaris, and HPUX for the guys
| downstairs. Outside of University and business, it was hard for
| individuals to break into it.
|
| By the late 90s any old anybody could get a CD ROM with Red Hat
| or whatever.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > The A..B concurrency printing
|
| Are those some sort of standard teaching exercise? Because
| before this article I only saw them in the description of the
| "concurrency geek" archetype on OSDev Wiki:
| https://wiki.osdev.org/Eleanore_Semaphore.
| gspencley wrote:
| > By the late 90s any old anybody could get a CD ROM with Red
| Hat or whatever.
|
| That's exactly how I got into Linux. I bought a book about
| RedHat 5.2 with a CD ROM install disc in the sleeve :) Have
| been using Linux on all of my personal devices (and every work
| device that I'm allowed to) ever since.
|
| Oddly enough, I also had a Sparc Station 5 on my desk at one
| time. I remember the filesystem seemed very slow but it was
| cool as hell to be able to use "real Unix." I remember it even
| came with Internet Explorer of all things!
| icedchai wrote:
| Before Linux took off, I remember playing around with Coherent
| on either a 286 or 386SX box. It was enough of a Unix clone:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)
|
| It cost around $100, IIRC. It also came with an incredible
| manual, covering the OS, C programming, system calls, etc.
| linguae wrote:
| I was born in 1989, so I missed the early days of Linux.
| However, I first heard of GNU and free software back in 2003
| when I was looking for a free alternative to WinZip, a
| shareware utility for decompressing zip archives. That's when I
| discovered not only a free alternative (I believe it was 7zip),
| but also the GNU General Public License. Up until that point, I
| never heard of free, open-source software (this was before I
| heard of Mozilla as an alternative to Internet Explorer, which
| I found out about in early 2004, and later Firefox). I already
| knew how to program, but it was within the Microsoft ecosystem;
| I had a copy of Visual Basic and I longed for the day when I
| could save enough money for the entire Visual Studio suite. But
| once I read about free, open-source software, it was like a
| whole new world of software opened up to me. I was a bit of a
| "goody two-shoes" who didn't want to pirate software, but I
| couldn't afford licenses for many commercial software packages,
| so having access to Linux, OpenOffice, GIMP, GCC, and other
| applications was a very big deal to me.
|
| One of the happiest moments of my teenage years came in 2004
| when a teacher gave me his old 475MHz AMD K6-2 desktop with 64
| MB RAM and Windows 98. Finally I had a computer of my own
| instead of using the family desktop! I downloaded and installed
| ZipSlack, a distribution of Slackware Linux that booted from
| DOS. Later that year a community college professor gave me
| FreeBSD installation disks. I credit these things for making me
| stick to a path of pursuing a career in computer science; at
| the time I was strongly considering majoring in linguistics,
| but I got entranced by operating systems and C thanks to Linux,
| FreeBSD, and gcc.
|
| Nearly 20 years later it still amazes me how anyone with an
| Internet connection and a computer can not only download and
| install production-grade software that powers billion-dollar
| businesses absolutely for free, but also download and study the
| source code of these software tools for absolutely free as
| well. Sometimes I get pessimistic about the state of computing
| these days, but it's things like free, open source software
| that reminds me why I love computing so much and why I still
| pursue a career in this field.
| pacaro wrote:
| Absolutely. I remember the articles in the trade press in the
| mid 90s asking "Is UN*X dead?" (Hindsight of course tells us
| that Betteridge's law applied)
|
| But I was working for a small ISV making a windows based GIS
| and our customers were putting windows boxen on every desk in
| the office, and then ditching either intergraph based solutions
| or complex systems with Tektronix terminals. Our per seat
| license was a rounding error in their previous costs, and you
| could drag a selected rectangle from our map window and drop it
| into a word document. I occasionally helped with sales demos
| and you could see when the decision was made in the faces of
| the senior people when they saw this.
| 64bittechie wrote:
| Started with Redhat 6.2! It was amazing and I did not turn back
| to Windows. My family was pissed at the fact that I dual booted
| the family PC!
| incanus77 wrote:
| Exactly. I was in university '95-99 and had access to amazing
| Solaris, IRIX, AIX, and other machines, grew to love UNIX, and
| wanted to run it on Intel hardware at home. RH Linux did just
| the trick.
| dimator wrote:
| i still remember reading when Carmack said (something like)
| anyone can learn to be any skill of developer, all they need is
| a used PC and linux CD.
|
| this was an eye opening quote for me when i read it, for some
| reason. it meant that the craft of software was the most
| accessible in all of human crafting. really an amazing time to
| grow up.
| 9front wrote:
| The Linux kernel took off after Linus receive the MINIX book,
| a.k.a Operating System Design and Implementation by Tanenbaum,
| which include the source code of MINIX. Until the arrival of the
| book Linus was playing "Prince Of Persia" on his new 386AT
| desktop.
| emmelaich wrote:
| I was doing CS at a similar time. Used Ultrix and HP-UX at work.
| Until Linux and Minix it was very hard to get a Unix on a PC.
| Someone had SystemV running, not sure how.
|
| Once Linux appeared, other home Unixes started evaporating,
| except for *BSDs.
|
| I was at the very first Sydney Linux Users Group meeting (SLUG).
| Have pics! The only pics of that event. Have tried to get
| permission from others so I can share, but no response :-(. Might
| share them anyway.
|
| Later in the 90s we had Linus over for a conference. Had a day
| out the harbour, good times. Got an excellent shot of Linus's
| head framed by the Opera House. Then found I had no film in the
| camera!
|
| Linux came back to Australia more than a few times of course. On
| one of these he was infamously bitten* by a Fairy Penguin.
|
| * Not sure if you could describe such a tiny animal as having a
| bite!
| meekaaku wrote:
| I wonder how much the overconfidence played in making it a
| success.
| [deleted]
| jononomo wrote:
| The fact that Linus created both Linux and Git will never cease
| to impress me. I might even suggest that Linus is a "ten x
| programmer".
| fifticon wrote:
| I wonder the number would be somewhat larger than 10.. Still,
| my hands can reach the keys on a keyboard, so I won't give up..
| zabzonk wrote:
| i started using linux in the mid-90s, after using commercial
| unices for the previous 10 years. i was amazed at how well-
| engineered it all was. i think i was using slack - too long ago
| to remember.
|
| thanks linus.
| bbarnett wrote:
| The only guy I knew who used commercial unixes at home back
| then, lived in Seattle and loved to play games.
|
| Even got his girlfriend interested in them, which was unusual
| at the time.
|
| Come to think of it, I remember one day some government goons
| took him away, right around that big nuclear scare. And no one
| has heard from him ever since.
|
| Hmm.
| zabzonk wrote:
| and your point is ... what?
| vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
| [dead]
| teleforce wrote:
| It's strange that Lars did not mention about Yggdrasil Linux,
| it's probably the earliest Linux distro even before Slackware
| existed [1][2].
|
| According to the article, 1992 is the year of Linux desktop by
| the introduction of X11 system but every year since then is
| allegedly the year of Linux on the desktop.
|
| Anyway this article has taken me back down memory lane, thanks
| Lars.
|
| 1) The Very 1st Linux OS Ever Made?
|
| https://www.linux.org/threads/the-very-1st-linux-os-ever-mad...
|
| 2) Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X
| bashtoni wrote:
| MCC interim was the first Linux distribution. Its creator had
| to implement what we would consider pretty fundamental tools,
| including fdisk.
|
| Yggdrasil was released half a year or so later, and included
| most of these tools.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCC_Interim_Linux
| teleforce wrote:
| Yes, I stand corrected.
|
| In fact my friend who studied in UMIST (now part of
| University of Manchester) introduced me to Linux. The fact
| that Manchester Computing Centre (MCC) is based inside UoM
| probably make it accessible to him because at the time Linux
| was installed from floppies.
| linuxhansl wrote:
| Hah. Used SLS (and then Slackware) back then. I think the first
| version of the kernel I used was 0.98pl13.
|
| I worked at DEC back then and did not have Internet at home, so I
| would schedule jobs at night to download the 1.3" floppy images
| and then copy them to actual floppies to bring home.
|
| Can't believe that is 30 years ago now.
| icedchai wrote:
| I also started with SLS, but got in a little later (late 92,
| maybe 93?) I think 0.99pl10 was where I started. I remember the
| 12 or 15 floppy images.
| Votearome wrote:
| [flagged]
| jgilias wrote:
| I miss the days when Slack didn't mean a chat app.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Aaah, yeah, the "good old days". I got started with Linux around
| 1995 or so. I don't actually remember which distribution I used
| first, as I was experimenting a lot back then. I remember using
| Turbo Linux, Yggdrasil, and Slackware at times. Sometime in 95 or
| 96 I was a student at UNC Wilmington and I remember a bunch of us
| were out in the courtyard by the C.S. building when somebody came
| up talking about this new company called "Red Hat" that was, get
| this, _selling_ Linux! That led to some rather, erm, passionate,
| discussion that day.
|
| I actually wound up gravitating to Red Hat linux myself in the
| end, and to this day I still use RH oriented distros (mostly
| Fedora) for most things. And I even wound up working for Red Hat
| for a spell.
|
| So yeah, Linux and his "toy" kernel definitely had a huge impact
| on my life over the years. And so did Bob Young and his company
| that had the audacity to charge money for free software. :-)
| mrits wrote:
| I installed slackware as a 12 year old in the early 90s. I only
| have 1 PC in the house (other computer was amiga 500 with no
| internet). My ISP only supported PPP connection which didn't
| work very well at the time on Linux.
|
| Since the PC was my only source to online help I literally had
| to reinstall windows and then slackware every time I made an
| attempt at getting it working. It took probably 15-20 rounds
| over a couple of months but when I got it felt like the biggest
| accomplishment of my life.
| danieldk wrote:
| More or less the same (12 years in 1994), however we didn't
| have internet until some years later. I learned pretty much
| everything from a Dutch Linux book (which was on the market
| very early) and all the HOWTOs and guides from the Linux
| Documentation project.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I sort of remember the first one I had. It came on a couple of
| 3.5 floppies. I promptly ignored it for a year or so then came
| back and it was 20+ of them now for slackware with hundreds of
| utilities I had no idea what they did. That was a ton of fun
| digging thru.
| unforgivenpasta wrote:
| > We decided to release version 1.0 and arranged a release event.
| The Finnish computer press was invited, and a TV station even
| sent a crew.
|
| Was this ever aired? Was it recorded? If so, is there a public
| archive of it somewhere?
| v7n wrote:
| Perhaps you missed the words "release event" being a hyperlink
| to this rather short clip on YouTube
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaDpjlFpbfo
|
| Edit: Decided to add a link to a Finnish-language 27 minute
| documentary of Linus (21.1.1998) so this isn't just a duplicate
| comment.
|
| https://areena.yle.fi/1-50115178
| bullion9872 wrote:
| Found this after quick search
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaDpjlFpbfo
| ssklash wrote:
| > "Linux is running on every continent, on every ocean, on
| billions of devices, in orbit, and on Mars."
|
| What a fantastically cool sentence!
| sdfghswe wrote:
| Wait, does this mean that Linux what programmed on MINIX?
| ajross wrote:
| Yes, it was bootstrapped from a minix install. The earliest
| filesystem was in fact minixfs, to share files with the
| development host environment.
| [deleted]
| davidw wrote:
| > After finishing the game, Linus started learning Intel assembly
| language. One day he showed me a program that did multitasking.
| One task or thread would write a stream of the letter "A" on the
| screen, the other "B"; the context switches were visually obvious
| when the stream of As became Bs. This was the first version of
| what would later become known as the Linux kernel.
|
| Reminds me of: "Gall's Law states that all complex systems that
| work evolved from simpler systems that worked. If you want to
| build a complex system that works, build a simpler system first,
| and then improve it over time."
|
| I owe so much to Linux and the whole free software movement, as a
| self-taught programmer. I set up my first Linux computer in late
| 1995 - it was a laptop with 4 mb of memory (which wasn't much
| even then) running Slackware that I'd downloaded over a modem
| over the course of several days.
|
| It was so cool to realize I could examine and modify the source
| code for... all of it! And interact with the people who had
| written all of it. I was hooked. I'm still using Linux as my
| primary development system these days.
| LastTrain wrote:
| Lovely article. My first install was Slackare 2.3, kernel version
| 1.2.13 on a 386sx. Thirteen floppies. I don't even remember why I
| installed it or where I'd heard of it. I don't think I even knew
| what Unix was, but I vividly remember the "darkstar $" prompt
| when it was all done and then my social life suffered for a few
| months...
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