The early days of Linux • Hacker News Board

Re: The early days of Linux

#191

Post by fulafel » Sat, Apr 15, 2023, 6:11 AM UTC

snvzz wrote: post #190

9front wrote: post #34

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.

If only if Linus actually listened to Tanenbaum. We could have a nice microkernel, multiserver design, instead of what we have. And we wouldn't have to deprecate Linux (soon now) to replace it with something better architected.

Are you still using Linux? Most of us moved to Hurd for exactly this reason already.

Re: The early days of Linux

#192

Post by brundolf » Sat, Apr 15, 2023, 6:32 AM UTC

> 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

We did exactly this for a project my freshman year of college, in 2011, except it was Dropbox instead of NFS :)

Re: The early days of Linux

#193

Post by starbase » Sat, Apr 15, 2023, 6:42 AM UTC

I felt SOO late to the game when I got into Linux in the 90s. And now I'm that old motherfucker with a quarter century under my belt. Holy hell, time flies.

Re: The early days of Linux

#194

Post by snvzz » Sat, Apr 15, 2023, 6:51 AM UTC

fulafel wrote: post #191

snvzz wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only if Linus actually listened to Tanenbaum. We could have a nice microkernel, multiserver design, instead of what we have. And we wouldn't have to deprecate Linux (soon now) to replace it with something better architected.

Are you still using Linux? Most of us moved to Hurd for exactly this reason already.

I mostly use Linux, yes.

As for HURD, I consider it a dead end, as it seems to have no direction and appears to have failed to move away from Mach.

Re: The early days of Linux

#195

Post by alexnastase » Sat, Apr 15, 2023, 7:11 AM UTC

Posts like these are the reason why I'm checking HN. It's really nice to read about Linux's humble beginnings especially given how wide-spread it has become today.

Re: The early days of Linux

#196

Post by brabel » Sat, Apr 15, 2023, 7:52 AM UTC

riceart wrote: post #140

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with Woz, the actual brains behind Apple. Jobs was just a charismatic designer and salesman.

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 eith…

> Steve Jobs was smarter than the majority of the commenters here IMHO.

Nah, you really think so?! Just because he was probably the most successful business leader in his generation you think he was smarter than us, HN commenters, despite our incredible feats like foreseeing the DropBox fiasco, predicting the LISP AI revival and so many others?

What leads you to such outrageous conclusion?

\s

Re: The early days of Linux

#197

Post by Rant423 » Sat, Apr 15, 2023, 8:53 AM UTC

snvsn wrote: post #45

Linus describes this and more in his book - Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. Great read

Agree.

If you liked this article, pick up the book.

Re: The early days of Linux

#198

Post by martyvis » Sat, Apr 15, 2023, 8:56 AM UTC

emmelaich wrote: post #148

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 res…

I'm pretty sure you should share them (statue of limitations and all that ;-) ). I probably went to my first SLUG meeting maybe '94 or '95. (I bought my 1st PC specially for dual booting DOS and Linux with Slackware early '93)

Re: The early days of Linux

#199

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Apr 15, 2023, 8:57 AM UTC

> The term "open source" was coined and IBM invested a ton of money in Linux development.

What goes around comes around, and now Red-Hat belongs to IBM.

Re: The early days of Linux

#200

Post by martyvis » Sat, Apr 15, 2023, 9:08 AM UTC

To those that wondered what it was like to get Linux running in those early days, here is a post I made in April 1993 (30 years ago this month!) to the "comp.os.linux" Usenet group trying to dual boot Linux and DOD on my new 486 PC with I think no more than a 80MB harddrive. (BTW a2,a3,a3 refer to the first 3 floppy disks you need after the boot and I think root disk to start installing)

Help installing Linux. 5/4/93

Hi, I,ve tried to install the SLS base system 99p6. I partitioned my 210 Maxtor drive to half DOS and then added a 15M /dev/hda2 (type 81 Linux,Minix) and 10M /dev/hda3 (type 83 Linux swap). After writing to the partition table and rebooting, I did a mkfs /dev/hda2 15504; mkswap /dev/hda3 4096; swapon /dev/hda3. After then running doinstall things seemed OK until it tried to start installing a2,a3 and a4. The system only looked at the disks for about a millisecond and then prompted me to insert the next one ( I was thinking, Boy! this installation is quick). Finally I got the prompt for formatted disk to make a boot disk. Thinking, I had finished, I attempted to boot this disk to no avail. Of course during doinstall I got messages such as "mv: command not found", "rm: command not found" and so forth. I am guessing that my /dev/hda2 is not mounting and hence the file system is not being transferred. I have been trying to dissassemble "doinstall" as most errors seem to be redirected to /dev/null.

One "error" I noted on booting is "WD8013 not found at 280 ". Can't the driver find my disk controller? I have a TMC 486/33 motherboard with a VESA IDE controller. Linux seems to be able access the disk because the partitioning worked and mkfs -c works the disk out.

Please help me out , I would love to get Linux up and running.