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The early days of Linux

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Re: The early days of Linux

#121
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...

Re: The early days of Linux

#122
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.

Re: The early days of Linux

#124

> 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?

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.

There's an anecdote that they answered the phone in the UNIX room with "eunuchs room" in a high pitched voice.

Re: The early days of Linux

#125

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…

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.

Re: The early days of Linux

#126
post #101
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: The early days of Linux

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always used the nose even when my friends used noseless emoticons as the latter look like squished faces to me :-P

Huh! I always read that as sticking out one's tongue.

The tongue was 'P'. Either ;P or ;-P (or :P or :-P).

Re: The early days of Linux

#130
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.

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