I really wish that I was born early so I’ve could witness the early years of Linux. What was it like being there when a kernel was released that would power multiple OSes and, best of all, for free?
I want know about everything: software, hardware, games, early community, etc.
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Alrighty, old Linux user from the earliest of days.
It was fun, really great to have one-on-one with Linus when Lilo gave issues with the graphic card and the screen kept blank during booting.
It was new, few fellow students where interested, but the few that did, all have serious jobs in IT right know.
Probably the mindset and the drive to test out new stuff, combined with the power Linux gave.
OMG… BOFH! I need to go find those stories now :-)
Didn’t expect to see a legend just scrolling here. Thank you for your contributions to computer science.
Clumsy. Manual. No multimedia support really. Compiling everything on 486 machines took hours.
Can’t say I look back fondly on it.
BeOS community was fucking awesome though. That felt like the cutting edge at the time.
BeOS and NetBSD was were it was at for sure!!
I desperately wanted one of those first BeBoxes or whatever they were called. And one of those little SGI toasters… I even tried to compile SGI’s 3D file manager (demo) from Jurassic Park.
Herp derp… where can I download an OpenGL from… it keeps saying I can’t build it without one 🤤
I can’t remember much about it now, but I remember really wanting BeOS. I managed to get it installed once, but couldn’t get the internet working, so ended up uninstalling it.
“Please insert Slackware disk Set A disk 3”
We had multiple fireproof boxes loaded with floppy backups…
You got it from a friend on a pile of slackware and floppies labeled various letters. It felt amazing and fresh, everything you could need was just a floppy away.
Then we got Gentoo and suddenly it was fun to wait 4 days to compile your kernel.
I remember my first Slackware installation from a pile of floppy disks!
I also remember that nothing worked after the installation, I had to figure out how to roll my own kernel and compile all the drivers. Kids today have it too easy.
shakes fist Now get offa ma lawn!
I tried compiling gentoo a bit later, upgraded from windows 95. Could never get to a login screen, I quit, and started using Linux later when it was easier to install
If you wanted to run Unix, your main choices were workstations (Sun, Silicon Graphics, Apollo, IBM RS/6000), or servers (DEC, IBM) They all ran different flavors of BSD or System-V unix and weren’t compatible with each other. Third-party software packages had to be ported and compiled for each one.
On x86 machines, you mainly had commercial SCO, Xenix, and Novell’s UnixWare. Their main advantage was that they ran on slightly cheaper hardware (< $10K, instead of $30-50K), but they only worked on very specifically configured hardware.
Then along came Minix, which showed a clean non-AT&T version of Unix was doable. It was 16-bit, though, and mainly ended up as a learning tool. But it really goosed the idea of an open-source OS not beholden to System V. AT&T had sued BSD which scared off a lot of startup adoption and limited Unix to those with deep pockets. Once AT&T lost the case, things opened up.
Shortly after that Linux came out. It ran on 32-bit 386es, was a clean-room build, and fully open source, so AT&T couldn’t lay claim to it. FSF was also working on their own open-source version of unix called GNU Hurd, but Linux caught fire and that was that.
The thing about running on PCs was that there were so many variations on hardware (disk controllers, display cards, sound cards, networking boards, even serial interfaces).
Windows was trying to corral all this crazy variety into a uniform driver interface, but you still needed a custom driver, delivered on a floppy, that you had to install after mounting the board. And if the driver didn’t match your DOS or Windows OS version, tough luck.
Along came Linux, eventually having a way to support pluggable device drivers. I remember having to rebuild the OS from scratch with every little change. Eventually, a lot of settings moved into config files instead of #defines (which would require a rebuild). And once there was dynamic library loading, you didn’t even have to reboot to update drivers.
The number of people who would write and post up device drivers just exploded, so you could put together a decent machine with cheaper, commodity components. Some enlightened hardware vendors started releasing with both Windows and Linux drivers (I had friends who made a good living writing those Linux drivers).
Later, with Apache web server and databases like MySql and Postgres, Linux started getting adopted in data centers. But on the desktop, it was mostly for people comfortable in terminal. X was ported, but it wasn’t until RedHat came around that I remember doing much with UIs. And those looked pretty janky compared to what you saw on NeXTStep or SGI.
Eventually, people got Linux working on brand name hardware like Dell and HPs, so you didn’t have to learn how to assemble PCs from scratch. But Microsoft tied these vendors so if you bought their hardware, you also had to pay for a copy of Windows, even if you didn’t want to run it. It took a government case against Microsoft before hardware makers were allowed to offer systems with Linux preloaded and without the Windows tax. That’s when things really took off.
It’s been amazing watching things grow, and software like LibreOffice, Wayland, and SNAP help move things into the mainstream. If it wasn’t for Linux virtualization, we wouldn’t have cloud computing. And now, with Steam Deck, you have a new generation of people learning about Linux.
PS, this is all from memory. If I got any of it wrong, hopefully somebody will correct it.
That’s great bit of history
It may be useful for people reading if you could add headers about when each decade starts, since you have many of them there
Contrary to other OSes, the information about it was mainly on the internet, no books or magazines. With only one computer at most homes, and no other internet-connected devices, that posed a problem when something didn’t work.
It took me weeks to write a working X11 config on my computer, finding all the hsync/vsync values that worked by rebooting back and forth. And the result was very underwhelming, just a terminal in an immovable window. I think I figured out how to install a window manager but lost all patience before getting to a working DE. Days and days of fiddling and learning.
Lol! 'Member Afterstep?
The desktop stretched across 4 screens was enough to hook me for life.
Xeyes… so many terminals… the artwork was artwork… wtf is transparency?! 😁 It was an amazing time to be a geek.
I didn’t get that far. And I only had an Amiga at that time, which made things more difficult to set up. I wonder how fluent transparency would be with AGA, haha. My next attempt was woth a PC around 2003 with KDE3 and it got me hooked.
Before modularized kernels became the standard I was constantly rerunning “make menuconfig” and recompiling to try different options, or more likely adding something critical back in :-D
I totally forgot about the shift to modules. What an upgrade!
A real pain in the ass. It was still worth it to use for the experience, especially if you had an actual reason to use it. Other than that it was just an exercise in futility most of the time…and I think that’s why we loved it. It was still kinda new. Interesting. And it didn’t spoon feed you. Was quite exhilarating.
I started using Slackware in the late 90s - say 1998. I used it for most of my desktop applications pretty much right away.
I don’t game much so that wasn’t an issue for me.
It was definitely harder to configure. I recompiled so many kernels and told myself the speed boost from getting exactly what I needed and nothing else was impressive. It wasn’t.
I dunno. It wasn’t as polished as it is now, and was harder to configure, but it was still very good, and once you got it configured, it kept working, unlike the more popular os of the day.
I started using Linux right in the late 90’s. The small things I recall that might be amusing.
- The installation process was easier than installing Arch (before Arch got an installer)
- I don’t recall doing any regular updates after things were working except for when a new major release came out.
- You needed to buy a modem to get online since none of the “winmodems” ever worked.
- Dependency hell was real. When you were trying to install an RPM from Fresh Meat and then it would fail with all the missing libraries.
- GNOME and KDE felt sincerely bloated. They seemed to always run painfully slow on modern computers. Moving a lot of people to Window Managers.
- it was hard to have a good web browser. Before Firefox came out you struggled along with Netscape. I recall having to use a statically compiled ancient (even for the time) version of Netscape as that was the only thing available at the time for OpenBSD.
- Configuring XFree86 (pre-cursor to X.org) was excruciating. I think I still have an old book that cautioned if you configured your refresh rates and monitor settings incorrectly your monitor could catch on fire.
- As a follow on to the last statement. I once went about 6 months without any sort of GUI because I couldn’t get X working correctly.
- Before PulseAudio you’d have to go into every application that used sound and pick from a giant drop down list of your current sound card drivers (ALSA and OSS) combined with whatever mixer you were using. You’d hope the combo you were using was supported.
- Everyone cheered when you no longer had to fight to get flash working to get a decent web browsing experience.
<I think I still have an old book that cautioned if you configured your refresh rates and monitor settings incorrectly your monitor could catch on fire.> Are you telling me that one dev for X.org could set someone’s monitor on fire by fucking with four lines of code?
Jesus Christ, thanks for that, I didn’t need to sleep tonight.
Monitors don’t work like that anymore. The ones that could catch on fire are pretty much all in the landfills by now.
I don’t recall doing any regular updates
You needed to buy a modem to get online
If you stay offline, you don’t need upgrading to prevent virus or hacking. That’s the norm in the good old days.
I cut my teeth with DOS and Netware, used Windows until the day 98 was released (had been using the GM for a month), and cut over to Slackware as my daily driver. Dabbled with Redhat before stabilising on Debian, which I’ve never found a need to change from for my headless boxes.
One thing I specifically remember was hand tuning my X11 config to drive my 15” Trinitron at 1024x768 @ ~68Hz.
X86 configs were painful and fun. Knowing a wrong setting might destroy your monitor was the right amount of adrenaline.
It was S.u.S.E. Linux 5.3
Great manual.
I was lucky that my NIC, graphics and sound card were supported out of the box.
But everything was still much worse than on Windows.
But I could taste the freedom.
Now all my devices run on Linux (except my Nintendo Switch).
Yeah those manuals were great i still have mine.
The danger of poorly configuring your XF86Config in a way that could irreparably damage your giant CRT monitor was thrilling.
In the late 90s you could get CDROMs from the nerds at university with everything you need on them. If you got your sound card working and could play an mp3, you felt like a master hacker who had beat the game.
Spent a week getting the audio driver to work so I could finally figure out how to properly pronounce “Linux…” and I still couldn’t.
Spent like $50 on floppy disks and like 2 days labeling them by hand before printing out the 20 pages of instructions, formatting my hard drive and installing Slackware. Realized I didn’t actually know any unix commands. Paged a friend.
