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The early days of Linux (2023)

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Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#81

Post by nobleach »

femto wrote: post #24
linsomniac wrote: post #8

One 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.

This is assuming that many of the folks who put their time and effort into the Linux kernel would have instead worked on Hurd. The thing is, nothing was stopping them from making that choice - other than maybe the popularity of Linux. I would love to see that timeline though.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#82

Post by jasoneckert »

I remember the early days of Linux well. There was quite a bit of interest for it at the University of Waterloo in the mid 90s, but there was also a lot of talk of issues getting it to install, or getting it to run stably on certain systems (albeit not uncommon for any OS at the time). Those were the days of having to know how to compile your own kernel and fight with XFree86.

Linux distributions like Red Hat really squashed those concerns within a short time and made things much easier on all fronts. Their documentation was also excellent.

By the late 1990s, Red Hat was as common as Solaris, AIX, and IRIX at the university, but most still considered it inferior to Solaris. And now, RHEL is the main *nix system used there (a few use Debian).

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#83

Post by pimeys »

emmelaich wrote: post #52
stmw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, he is part of the Swedish minority in Finland... I thought everyone (on HN) already knew that?

Many Fins can speak Swedish. Around 10pc? It is an official language. When I met Linus T in 1994/5 I asked why he spoke Swedish and not Finnish and he rolled his eyes. Was so sick of the question even then. https://linuxjournal.rubdos.be/ljarchive/LJ/008/2867.html

Yeah. Speaking swedish especially in the coastal area of Finland is quite common. My father in law mixes both languages together in a funny way in his talk. It's kind of funny, but also pretty common among the Finnish-Swedes...

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#84

Post by jks »

api wrote: post #76
linuxhansl wrote: post #40

Fun. I started using Linux at 0.98 (forgot the patch level), in 1992. Had a modem and connected to a lot of bulletin boards. I felt very much a like "WarGames" hero, calling phone numbers and all :) I still remember the day when I used ppp to connect to the actual Internet for the first time. After a lot of trial and error, I finally pinged www.linux.org, and it resolved the hostname and returned the ping. I was sile…

My first net connection was using slirp via a shell account. Slirp was a CSLIP emulator that ran in user space on the shell box on the remote side. Back in those days multi user shell machines were quite common and some of the first ISPs offered Internet access that way. Mine was an ISP called Internet Access Cincinnati that gave each user shell on a Sun Sparc 10 running SunOS (pre-Solaris). You also got POP e-mail a…

Slirp lives on in QEMU and container engines: https://github.com/rootless-containers/slirp4netns

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#85

Post by II2II »

hnlmorg wrote: post #71
vednig wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every well can be poisoned. Linux relies on people's values and people's skills. Neither of which are immune to degradation over time. It's rather the opposite, combined with moral stance of Linus and it's core committee itself that has managed to kept Linux on this track so far.

The kernel is only a small part of the overall Linux ecosystem. These days even GNU is a small part. systemd, Wayland, Xorg, PulseAudio, CUPS, KDE, Gnome, etc are all maintained outside of Linus and GNUs governance. What FOSS operating systems (and not even Linux specifically) offers is freedom to choose. But the effort of using some alternatives can be significant. So I wouldn’t say Linux is immune to having its “we…

> What FOSS operating systems (and not even Linux specifically) offers is freedom to choose. But the effort of using some alternatives can be significant.

True. On the other hand, Linux (the kernel) does provide the foundation. You can replace most of components above it and you will still have hardware support for a wide range of hardware. Even if you were to develop an entirely new kernel, the Linux kernel can serve as a proxy for documentation for undocumented or poorly documented hardware.

I realize that places a disproportionate amount of emphasis on the device drivers when the kernel offers so much more and an incredible amount of effort goes into the ecosystem outside of the kernel, but the reality is that most alternative operating systems grow beyond the academic toy phase. Part of the reason is the difficulty in attracting potential users, including developers, if those users have to use said operating system in a virtual machine.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#86

Post by trueismywork »

pimeys wrote: post #83
emmelaich wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many Fins can speak Swedish. Around 10pc? It is an official language. When I met Linus T in 1994/5 I asked why he spoke Swedish and not Finnish and he rolled his eyes. Was so sick of the question even then. https://linuxjournal.rubdos.be/ljarchive/LJ/008/2867.html

Yeah. Speaking swedish especially in the coastal area of Finland is quite common. My father in law mixes both languages together in a funny way in his talk. It's kind of funny, but also pretty common among the Finnish-Swedes...

Transcoding

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#87

Post by ttyprintk »

jasoneckert wrote: post #82

I remember the early days of Linux well. There was quite a bit of interest for it at the University of Waterloo in the mid 90s, but there was also a lot of talk of issues getting it to install, or getting it to run stably on certain systems (albeit not uncommon for any OS at the time). Those were the days of having to know how to compile your own kernel and fight with XFree86. Linux distributions like Red Hat really…

I think this is consistent with big universities at the time. I remember when Alpha was becoming discontinued, reinstalling RedHat on those did give Linux a boost as a daily driver for researchers.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#88

Post by p_ing »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #18

Such an inspiring read! Thanks for writing and/or sharing. One of my many future hermit projects is to hack on an early version of Linux. ------------ Please ignore just jotting down for future myself --------------- (Actually I want to study Win NT more than Linux as it brought me good memories, but Win NT was designed as a mature product from the beginning, and even the leaked 3.5 source code is way too much for me…

> I want to study Win NT

Windows NT Design Workbook:

https://computernewb.com/~lily/files/Documents/NTDesignWorkb...

Tale of Two Kernels:

https://youtu.be/HdV9QuvgS_w

And I'm sure you've picked up a copy of Windows Internals. Right now I'm waiting for a copy of Inside Windows NT which is the first edition of that series as well as Inside the Windows NT File System, both by Helen Custer.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#89

Post by exe34 »

qwertox wrote: post #36

It's odd how Linux has become the only stable thing in this world. You turn it on and you know that over time it will only become better without any bad intentions.

I worry that it's a Linus thing - he still has to step in and call for order now and again. I don't know for sure if it will remain on the trajectory of always getting better when he retires.

Re: The early days of Linux (2023)

#90

Post by rjsw »

linsomniac wrote: post #8

One 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…

I ran 386/ix [1] on a i386 PC from 1987, switched to 386BSD 0.1 in late 1992, then FreeBSD sometime in 1993.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Systems_Corporatio...

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