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The early days of Linux

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Re: The early days of Linux

#91

Post by smoldesu »

earthscienceman wrote: post #23
asciii wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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://putsom…

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 impac…

> 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.

Re: The early days of Linux

#93

Post by jimbokun »

davidthewatson wrote: post #37

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…

Commercial concerns were also the raison d'être in software before and during the time Linus was creating Linux, too.

Re: The early days of Linux

#94

Post by bluedino »

cesarb wrote: post #73
kyaghmour wrote: post #30

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 tho…

> 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…

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

Re: The early days of Linux

#95

Post by sumtechguy »

mindcrime wrote: post #27

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 com…

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.

Re: The early days of Linux

#96

Post by fatnoah »

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.

Re: The early days of Linux

#97

Post by teleforce »

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

Re: The early days of Linux

#98

Post by GoofballJones »

fatnoah wrote: post #96

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…

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.

Re: The early days of Linux

#99

Post by ndesaulniers »

jjice wrote: post #7

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.

Linus signed my copy!

Re: The early days of Linux

#100

Post by bashtoni »

teleforce wrote: post #97

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://…

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

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