TIL: Linus is a Swedish speaking Finn; and those are a thing. This sound has lived rent-free in my head since 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linus-linux.ogg
Wow! I think he got different in his English diction much later in his life?
The early days of Linux (2023)
21–30 of 143 posts
Re: The early days of Linux (2023)
#22early 90s, i286 story reminded me purchasing my i386 SX (4 MBs RAM, perhaps 20 MB HD), running DOS 5, then DOS 6 could not afford the DX edition for some reason. i286s were just phasing out then.
amazing how linux started. thanks for sharing!
Re: The early days of Linux (2023)
#23See also, by the same author: https://liw.fi/linux20
Re: The early days of Linux (2023)
#24One thing I often think about in the early days of Linux is it's competitors. The article mentions "commercial Unix was so expensive it was easier to write your own". Which is largely true. However there is also Coherent Unix. I remember adverts for it as the full back page of so many magazines of the day, for $99. I always was on the fence about buying it. One of the big drawbacks of Coherent was that it didn't have…
It's interesting to ponder whether we would all be using GNU Hurd if Linux didn't exist.
Re: The early days of Linux (2023)
#25One thing I often think about in the early days of Linux is it's competitors. The article mentions "commercial Unix was so expensive it was easier to write your own". Which is largely true. However there is also Coherent Unix. I remember adverts for it as the full back page of so many magazines of the day, for $99. I always was on the fence about buying it. One of the big drawbacks of Coherent was that it didn't have…
Yep! I remember that time. I ran Coherent briefly (1991 - 1992 or so) before getting into early Linux distros like SLS.
Re: The early days of Linux (2023)
#26One thing I often think about in the early days of Linux is it's competitors. The article mentions "commercial Unix was so expensive it was easier to write your own". Which is largely true. However there is also Coherent Unix. I remember adverts for it as the full back page of so many magazines of the day, for $99. I always was on the fence about buying it. One of the big drawbacks of Coherent was that it didn't have…
ahh yes, coherent. where i cut my teeth on unix style systems. it supported memory protection on 286 cpus (true segmentation!) but had no ip stack (uucp was supported though). no x or graphics.
pretty good documentation in a big doorstop they called "the lexicon.", a decent c tool chain, a custom port of emacs (microemacs they called it).
only other unix i played with before that was some port on the atari st, which incidentally was a first class platform for the mark williams c compiler (mwc was the company behind coherent).
it fit on two disks. where i had a massive stack of floppies for slackware (kernel 0.99pl2). linux was more fun- it was open source by and of the internet.
fun times!
Re: The early days of Linux (2023)
#27One thing I often think about in the early days of Linux is it's competitors. The article mentions "commercial Unix was so expensive it was easier to write your own". Which is largely true. However there is also Coherent Unix. I remember adverts for it as the full back page of so many magazines of the day, for $99. I always was on the fence about buying it. One of the big drawbacks of Coherent was that it didn't have…
Reading a review from Dec 1990[1], it doesn't seem that brilliant: "Coherent remains true to Unix's roots and eschews local area networking, graphical user interfaces, menus, mice, and many of the other amenities that present-day DOS users and Unix users have come to expect of modern software." It goes on to describe that "learning Unix from Coherent would be a bumpy road" and "nor could you realistically use Coheren…
Did it not have some kind of ncurses functionality? So much of what I see about software from the eighties (mostly via movies) seems operable with just an unnetworked unix terminal.
Re: The early days of Linux (2023)
#28One thing I often think about in the early days of Linux is it's competitors. The article mentions "commercial Unix was so expensive it was easier to write your own". Which is largely true. However there is also Coherent Unix. I remember adverts for it as the full back page of so many magazines of the day, for $99. I always was on the fence about buying it. One of the big drawbacks of Coherent was that it didn't have…
Indeed, this is really interesting question about Linux and Linus in the early days - it obviously wasn't just the price of the alternatives or the overall concept of ~Unix-on-x86 - there was something different about Linus Torvalds' approach even early on, and one can see glimpses of it in these early stories.
Re: The early days of Linux (2023)
#29TIL: Linus is a Swedish speaking Finn; and those are a thing. This sound has lived rent-free in my head since 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linus-linux.ogg
Indeed, he is part of the Swedish minority in Finland... I thought everyone (on HN) already knew that?
Re: The early days of Linux (2023)
#30[2023], but that doesn't matter much. Fantastic article! Great to see what development was like at the start - I'd always heard anecdotes, like its humble beginnings and the MINIX argument, but I'd never had context for them before.
My bad, dang just pointed this out as well:
Discussed at the time (of the article):
The early days of Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35557848 -
April 2023 (224 comments)