The Linux Distributions of 1992 • Hacker News Board

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#11

Post by butterisgood » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 2:20 PM UTC

(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.

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#12

Post by terrywang » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 2:25 PM UTC

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...).

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#13

Post by gattilorenz » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 2:28 PM UTC

wiz21c wrote: post #8

I think I remember that I started with something called TSX11 / SunSite... Is there any HN'ers who see what that was ?

> 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...

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#14

Post by mindcrime » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 2:32 PM UTC

wiz21c wrote: post #8

I think I remember that I started with something called TSX11 / SunSite... Is there any HN'ers who see what that was ?

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

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#15

Post by tomrod » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 2:41 PM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #9

nobleach wrote: post #5

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 ver…

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 a…

MS really needs to release a Linux Excel.

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#16

Post by hef19898 » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

tomrod wrote: post #15

hef19898 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

MS really needs to release a Linux Excel.

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...

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#17

Post by skydhash » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 2:51 PM UTC

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

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#18

Post by wolfi1 » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 2:51 PM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #9

nobleach wrote: post #5

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 ver…

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 a…

I never got used to Excel, most of the spreadsheet things Excel is used for can be achieved by awk

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#19

Post by Agingcoder » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 2:52 PM UTC

kar1181 wrote: post #2

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 compone…

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.

Re: The Linux Distributions of 1992

#20

Post by sillystuff » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

SemiNormal wrote: post #7

icedchai wrote: post #3

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.

My first was Slackware. Back when they would mail you a CD of the distro for free.

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.