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.
You spent a few evenings downloading a hundred or so 1.44MB floppy imges over a 56kbps modem. You then booted the installer off one of those floppies, selected what software you wanted installed and started feeding your machine the stack of floppies one by one.
Once that was complete you needed to install the Linux boot loader “LiLo” to allow you the boot it (or your other OS) at power on.
All of that would get you to the point where you had a text mode login prompt. To get anything more you needed to gather together a lot of detailed information about your hardware and start configuring software to tell it about it. For example, to get XFree86 running you needed to know
- what graphics chip you had
- how much memory it had
- which clock generator it used
- which RAMDAC was on the board
- what video timings your monitor supported
- the polarity of the sync signals for each graphics mode
This level of detail was needed with every little thing
- how many heads and cylinders do your hard drives have
- which ports and irqs did your soundcard use
- was it sound blaster compatible or some other protocol
- what speeds did your modem support
- does it need any special setup codes
- what protocol did your ISP use over the phone line
- what was the procedure to setup an tear down a network link over it
The advent of PCI and USB made things a lot better. Now things were discoverable, and software could auto-configure itself a lot of the time because there were standard ways to ask for information about what was connected.
Jesus Christ. Glad I got to ride of the backs of the giants before me. Live CD’s were so much fun back around 2001.
