The early days of Linux (2023)

"I was there, Gandalf. I was there 3000 years ago" XD

Every field office had 2 or 3 PC's dedicated to the task of providing a "remote terminal" to our development team, so that we could dial in remotely and do administrative things to the Progress 4GL database server that was running on another dedicated system for the task, usually a fat Novell Netware server with 4 or 8 "huge" disks of 640Megabytes dedicated to the databases.

It was my job to monitor the rows and rows of PC's on our side of things, that were used for remote admin.

Honestly, I despised this job.

I'd spent most of the 80's learning C and Unix programming - my first Unix machine was a MIPS Computing Magnum pizzabox running risc/OS. $15,000 worth of machine, sitting on my desk - but yet I still had to walk down the corridor and hack around on cheap DOS PC's just to get things fixed across the country in some hellish New Hampshire closet.

At least it paid me well.

Well enough that I could go to the regular PC Computer swap meets out in Pasadena every weekend or so, and buy myself the parts needed to build a "decent computer for home" - a 486 with 8Megabytes of RAM, a few hundred megabytes of disk space. A CD-ROM drive, maybe a high-end video card and monitor capable of 1025x768 and 256 colours. A modem, so I could work from home, run my own DesqView instance, have my own multiple-terminal connections to all those troublesome field offices.

I'd also make regular (weekly) jaunts to The Opamp Bookstore, in Hollywood - one of my favourite places in all the world. It was there I'd wandered into the "Unix" section and seen some magazines and books on the MINIX operating system, and it was there that I learned about the rise of Usenet as a place to get to meet other hackers, C programmers, Unix nerds. It was also where I'd get my 2600 Magazine fix, monthly.

One day, I got my home PC finally built, booted, and running. I connected to my mailserver, wnsnews.com .. checked my mail. A fellow operator had sent me a message "Check out the minix-list, they're talking about a new unix-like kernel you might be interested in..."

So I subscribe, and lo and behold, there it was - the link to ftp.funet.fi, Linux in its very early stages. It took me about a day to download it, about a week to figure out all the various floppy disks I'd have to make to get the drivers for everything set up, and a whole weekend of faffing around to get things installed alongside my Desqview setup, on a brand new hard drive.

I was hooked. It didn't have everything - X11 wasn't ported yet - but it had just enough for me to port some of my own C code, see that things could actually work like my MIPS pizzabox, albeit on my cheaper 486, and .. maybe .. someday .. someone would port "Remote Control" or even the Desqview terminals, to this brand new 'Linux' thing.

Some months later, in the middle of being shut down entirely by my fellow grey-beard programmers, who wanted me to stop fiddling about with all the spare parts in our "Remote Control" room, I learned about this brand new Linux 'distribution', Yggdrasil.

A trip to OpAmp book shop, and there it was: the bootable floppy and the full Linux filesystem, included on CD, to turn any of our machines into a working Linux system - with X11 onboard! And, probably working, if I chose our SVGA card settings right! What a revelation! I could use my home 486 as a decent terminal for my pizzabox! I could use telnet to get into the Novell servers across the other side of the country! I could endlessly annoy my grey-beard associates with the idea that "Linux is the Future, man!", over and over again, until they finally lock me out of the Novell server and decide I was only good for Unix things, as punishment, because as they knew full well "Unix is Dead, man!"

Well, the decades have rolled by, and what a death it is. Linux is everywhere. I have used it every day since that first post on the minix-list I noticed, the one about funet.fi. I've made a living with it, and I've done amazing things, boring things, mundane things, and normal things. "Netware is Dead, Man! Desqview is Dead, Man! DOS is long gone, man!"

Well, alright, MIPS Computing didn't last long, and that pizzabox was well and truly (sadly) de-commissioned. But, with the profits I made in SoCal during the 90's, putting Linux to work from my own little consulting office in One Wilshire, I bought all the SGI toys I could want .. and I still have them.

Curious, though, that I mostly use Apples' Unix as a front-end to access them all, heheh ..