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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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.
The only OS that was solid as a desktop OS back then, with good usability, was BeOS. Both MacOS and Windows had stability problems (although NT/2000 were much better, but lacked app/game compatibility), and Linux was a nightmare to update and run (lots of compiling too). So the OS of choice back then for me, was BeOS. I could do everything I needed with it too.
Stuff needed tweaking more wine worked almost never even for basically window’s programs. Configuring Xfree86 was black magic. Running Startx at the terminal prompt was like rolling the dice. Distro choice was smaller and it was really a choice. Since the child distros were less of a thing. You had Debian , Redhat, Slackware, and SUSE. All were very different at a fundamental level with packaging and philosophy. Also it was way more common to buy boxed copies of Linux distros with big thick manuals that helped you get it installed and take your first steps with Linux. It reminded me of when I first got my TI 83 calculator an it had that massive manual with it.
Also Lugs and spending a lot of time on IRC getting and helping people on freenode (don’t go there now) was a must.
I got tired of compiling the kernel taking a day on my Pentium pc. So I got a pile of 486s the uni was throwing out, built a Beowulf cluster out of them and soon I was able to compile the kernel in two and half days.
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
it was garbage.
servers already worked well for the time, but desktop was rough.
I tried to use Slackware in the mid 90s. After two solid days trying to get my ppp dialup connection to come up after a reboot - it would come up in the first boot after install, run for days like that, but after any reboot it was dead and gone and nobody on the internet seemed to know how to deal with it. “Real men” didn’t use dialup, and people on dialup (self included) had no clue.
I declared it “not ready for prime time” due to that, and issues with sound drivers, and ignored it until 2003. In 2003 I tried some Cygwin and was impressed with its performance, so very close to “bare metal” Ubuntu. In 2004-5 the 64 bit AMD chips were coming out and I used Gentoo to build a true 64 bit system addressing 8GB of RAM - there wasn’t really any other option.
I got tired of compiling every little part of the system from source for days on end and migrated to various flavors of Ubuntu / Debian, which by 2006-7 was becoming a viable desktop alternative. Before that you ALWAYS had to have a Windows machine for something, usually several somethings. At this point I only use my company issued Windows laptop when I need to connect to the company VPN, which can be months between needs depending on what I’m doing. My wife and I use Ubuntu full time now.
I spent what felt like many moons trying to compile Gentoo when I was a kid. There was only the wiki and a gritty forum for getting answers, nothing in real-time. I didn’t have very much knowledge of the kernel or messing with modules, and was certainly lost on getting a desktop environment going even after I got past the kernel part.
It was such an experience, I decided to become a janitor.
ETA: also this guy (not strictly linux, but same vibes)
Gentoo got pretty well defined / easy to compile by 2004 - I managed to get a 64 bit system built and working after a couple of tries, each try taking multiple days of course.
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.
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 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 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.
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 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.
Poor Annie.
Remember the slow internet jad to wait overnight for 40 megabyte game and finally finding out it didn’t work.
Up all night, and all you got to see was a boob
Remember the Internet at these speeds, Moss? Up all night and you’d see three women.
Half of it because random disconnect happened in the middle and download did not resume.
In glorious 256 colors !
jad
Nope, i had 10Mb fiber in 1995.
“Please insert Slackware disk Set A disk 3”
We had multiple fireproof boxes loaded with floppy backups…
Reading how-tos(may be the source code too) are all you needed. No need to listen random stuff from some random YouTubers. Ppl can read that time. Books and magazines did exist.
How many times did I read the condescending “HOW-TO sound drivers” with it’s condescending opening of “If you must hear biff bark” and it’s virtually always unhelpful content. Maybe one install in 10 would benefit from the pearls of Linux Audio wisdom contained therein, and it was the best available source for YEARS.
I loved reading HOWTOs, they were a bit like scene zines, but the content wasn’t that helpful indeed
winmodems and modelines were problematic but it was liberating to be able to tinker.
and walnut creek was doing the Lord’s work.
Walnut Creek and infomagic saved me so much headache. Can’t beat the bandwidth of a FedEx truck, especially when you’re 28.8 at home.
I remember the name Walnut Creek, but I don’t remember why. Did they ship the Slackware CDs? I had a couple of full sets of those, but ultimately decided that Linux needed to mature before I’d mess with it. By 2003 it had gotten there.
It was always fun saying +++ATH in IRC to see who hadn’t configured their escapes properly
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. 🤣PRESS ALT+F4 for ops! 😂
OMG… the showmanship…
Someone-being-bratty-on-IRC: […] Me: We’re going to take away your internet access if you don’t behave. Bratty: Fuck you! You can’t do tha 5 minutes later… Bratty: How did you do that???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.
Explained nicely here: https://everything2.com/title/%252B%252B%252BATH0
Wow, a post from 2001 that’s still online today. You don’t see that often any more!
+++ath0is 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.
Yes, and encryption had nothing to do with it (though I suppose it would have prevented it in this case).
A properly configured modem would ignore this coming from the Internet side, or escape the characters so that they didn’t form that string.
Encryption would prevent it - that’s what I meant :)
I think the trick is to convince someone to send that string, so the modem sees it coming from the computer. Similar to tricking someone into pressing Alt+F4 or Ctrl+Alt+Del twice on Windows 9x.
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.
Hard
94-95 school year for me. Prior to win 95. Honestly OS2 warp was the tits then, blew windows and linux away. But the cool thing about linux was that you could pull a session from the college mainframe and then run all the software off campus. Over a modem. Pro E, maple, matlab, gopher, Netscape, ftp/fsp, irc, on and on. Once you had X going on your 486, you were good to go.
But honestly, it was nerd sh$t. Dos was king until win95. And then nobody looked back until win8 made us realize Microsoft had started sucking.
I started programming in DOS professionally in January 1991. It was pretty clear how bad Microsoft sucked by February of 1991, and blindingly obvious when they “updated” DOS more than annually with “95% backward compatibility” which translated to: "we just broke all your programs and you’re only going to have to figure out which 5% of your code you’re going to have to update to make it work in this version - aaaaand, by the time you do that we will be releasing a newer version! ;-P "
Something called DrDOS came along and we used it just because it wasn’t updating and breaking backward compatibility so often. Since 640k wasn’t enough for us even then, we ended up putting the kludge “Phar-Lap 32 bit extender” libraries on our product so we could access all the cheap RAM that systems were being shipped with (2MB was pretty much standard by 1992).
Then there was the day that McAffee decided that our product’s main .exe was a virus. It wasn’t. It wasn’t infected with anything. It didn’t do anything vaguely resembling malware. McAffee just had a false positive pattern match with our software.
The Microsoft treadmill was a very real thing all through the 1990s - much like Android and iOS are today. Sure, you’ve got a cool idea for an app, but we’re going to keep shifting the OS underneath you so that you’re spending 90%+ of your time just recoding your same old app for the latest OS release. That way you don’t have any time to innovate and maybe threaten our business model.
win8 made us realize
Bruh you were late. Vista sucked, 7 sucked, they were shit since XP. Sure, I kept using it until 10 because I was afraid linux still didn’t work, but XP was the last time I was happy with computers until I installed Fedora.
Yeah, I jumped ship right around the time Win8 came out. 14.04 was an interesting time to start learning. I was obsessed with trimming out bloat, so I used a tool to uninstall orphaned packages. Problem was, it also deleted some dependencies for GNOME.
I had, to quote the most helpful and humorous person in an Ubuntu forum post, “borked it so bad it had to be nuked from orbit.”
I have since learned my lesson and learned to be a little bit more careful with the magical responsibilities of sudo.
I have turned to scripting all of my desktop mods and keeping them in a git repo. So, when I nuke a system from orbit all I have to do is install fresh, add git, check out my repo and run the scripts.
