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.
Honestly, it sucked. Like most computing at the time. Everything came on a ton of floppy disks, it was impossible to update online unless you had a good connection (which nobody did), and you had to do everything by hand, including compiling a lot of stuff which took forever. I mean, I’m glad I got the experience, but I would never wanna go back to that. It sucked.
Remember the slow internet had to wait overnight for 40 megabyte game and finally finding out it didn’t work.
Half of it because random disconnect happened in the middle and download did not resume.
Remember when packages like RPM were first introduced, and it was like, “cool, I don’t have to compile everything!” Then you were introduced to Red Hat’s version of DLL-Hell when the RPM couldn’t find some obsure library! Before YUM, rpmfind.net was sooo useful!
I still use pkgs.org pretty frequently when I need to find versions of packages and their dependencies across different distros and versions of distros. I had to use that to sneakernet something to fix a system just this past week.
Shit like that was the last straw for me and I ended up bailing on Linux for, like, 10 years until I got back into it around 2006.
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.
The BOFH and his PFY are still helping their users…
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.
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’m sure most are aware of this but, just incase anyone passing through is not… Haiku OS
Works great in a VM… fun to play with, have not tried bare metal / daily driving it though.
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.
It wasn’t too early, maybe 1997.
I was like 12 or so and I had just installed Linux.
I figured out, from the book I was working with, how to get my windows partition to automaticallyount at boot. Awesome!
I had not been able to figure out how to start “x” though.
So I rebooted into Windows, for on EFnet #linux, and asked around.
Got a command, wrote it down on a slip of paper, and rebooted into Linux.
I should mention, I also hadn’t figured out about privileges, or at least why you wouldn’t want to run around as root.
Anyway, I started typing in the command that I wrote down: rm -rf /.
I don’t have to tell you all, that is not the correct command. The correct command was startx.
After I figured it was taking way too long, I decided to look up what the command does, and then immediately shut down the system.
It was far too late.
My pranks were less destructive … /ctcp nick +++ath0+++ … it was amazing how often that worked. 🤣
Thats a new one on me. What did that do if I may ask? Best I have been able to figure out is that it’s probably IRC related but that’s it.
+++ath0 is a command that tells a dial up modem to disconnect. I’ve never seen it used in IRC this way, but my guess is that the modem would see this coming from the computer and disconnect.
This was back in the days when everything was unencrypted.
Explained nicely here: https://everything2.com/title/%252B%252B%252BATH0
That’s terrible! They helped me fix my system when I decided I was fancy enough to try building a new version of gcc and go off-script a bit.
IIRC I deleted library.so rather that overwriting it. If I hadn’t been running IRC on another terminal already I would have been done for.
