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Linux was first released to the world from here 17.9.1991
- pandemic_region 7y agoI have fond memories of funit.fi, and it wasn't because of the Linux kernels being released there ;-)
- bArray 7y agoI thought of a fun exercise: Take the original Linux kernel, study it and slowly build upon it without looking at the current Linux kernel. My thinking is that it could be quite interesting to see how different people evolve the kernel - maybe some interesting ideas result.
- rmrfstar 7y agoThat sounds fun, but a very bad use of time. Linus' monolithic kernel won out over Tanenbaum's microkernel, because it just worked. In the 1990s that was important. Now we want it to work and not get totally pwned because we opened a sketchy email attachment before we had our coffee. Tanenbaum was right [1], but for the wrong reasons, and way too early. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...
- Jonnax 7y agoSeems like a waste of time. Like if you want to have a look at a different kernel designed recently: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts
- prashnts 7y agoI wouldn't consider it a waste, the changes and history behind those changes to the design seem interesting to me.
- hakmad 7y agoWhere would one find the original kernel?
- gruntz 7y agohttp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/Linux/kernel/Historic/linux-0.01.tar.gz http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/Linux/kernel/Historic/linux-0.01.tar...
- dx034 7y agoThis repo claims to have the original: https://github.com/zavg/linux-0.01 https://github.com/zavg/linux-0.01
- ville 7y agoThis tarball seems to include the original kernel sources: http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/linux-0.01.tar.gz http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/linux-0.01.tar... The release notes for 0.01 are here: http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.01 http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/R...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 7y agoI've always wondered what Torvalds's answer would be if you asked him if he had the chance to snap his fingers and have the kernel rewritten from scratch what he would change?
- bregma 7y agoAdd an 'e' to the creat() call?
- jjgreen 7y agoNot much scope for that, it's POSIX (and Ken Thompson's "fault" https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8390979/ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8390979/)
- beefhash 7y agoWhatever it is, I hope the answer involves “implement kevent(2) instead of creating epoll(2)”.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rvz 7y agoThe Linux kernel has been the greatest example of a global network of programmers contributing in the open and it has shown that open-source software with the GPL works for the contributors and for companies relying on Linux in production environments. I see most of the FAANG companies (Except Apple obviously) have at least contributed in some way, which is interesting to see. For server-side environments or to some extent Android, I can see those as reasons for companies to contribute patches but I'm not sure for the future of several individual distros which are still floating around today, even when I rarely switch between macOS and Ubuntu these days..
- Aloha 7y agoI was under the impression that even Apple used linux for its production web environments.
- rvz 7y agoWell 'using' Linux in production is quite different to actually contributing to the development to it. From the FAANMG group of companies: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft and Google all have employees signing off patches under their company emails and no-one should be surprised to see no contributions from Apple to the Linux kernel anyway.
- knome 7y ago> to see no contributions from Apple to the Linux kernel anyway There is one person submitting patches to the linux kernel under an @apple.com address and a few more listed as having reported them. That's as of the last time I pulled the kernel repo back in November.
- saagarjha 7y agoWhich, compared to any company of its size, is essentially negligible.
- capableweb 7y ago
- jjuliano 7y agoI remember my first Linux distro, Monkey Linux, downloaded from the BBS. It fits on 5 floppy disks, with XFree86. You have to use `arj` to extract it, an alternative to `pkunzip` during that time. (http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/monkey-6.0 http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/monk...). SuSE invented LiveCD, AFAIR, years before Knoppix claims to be the first LiveCD Linux in the late 90s.
- danieldk 7y agoSuSE invented LiveCD, AFAIR, years before Knoppix claims to be the first LiveCD Linux in the late 90s. Yggdrasil Linux was earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X
- fit2rule 7y agoYggdrasil was amazing. It single-handedly helped me sell Linux to many a grizzled greybeard, who couldn't believe that this toy kernel would amount to anything .. all I had to do was boot the CD and show them a working X-terminal a few minutes later, and that was all it took: I spent days copying those CD's for the entire team.
- jtaft 7y agoMandrake, Slackware, then Gentoo here. Curious, do you remember when user contributable/rolling package managers became popular? Back in 2000 when I wanted latest software, I remember having to resolve dependencies manually (view compile errors, then yahoo/google for libraries and errors). Each dependency had to be compiled manually, sometimes requiring patching code to get things to play nice. This was always a headache lol, but felt awesome once things actually compiled.
- jjuliano 7y agoDebian is the first distro to allows volunteer to maintain packages. Then Ubuntu releases Hoary and gives invitation to be a MOTU maintainer with hangout channel in FreeNode, later on, Mercurial was released and Launchpad.net was created during Dapper days at the time where GIT is not yet mainstream, which gives way to PPA packages, then after a year, ArchLinux gains popularity, which allows anyone to submit packages using `yaourt`, a custom package manager on top of `pacman`.
- tmountain 7y agoAh, the memories of ordering distro bundles from cheapbytes and gleefully experimenting in my “test lab” (aka bedroom). It’s hard to quantify how liberating the early Linux days felt after a slow and painful indoctrination to computing in the Windows world.
- danieldk 7y agoWhen I was 15-16, me and a friend ordered CD-ROMs from CheapBytes and sold them in The Netherlands (with a label applied to cover the CheapBytes branding). Most people didn't have credit cards in the 90s, so this scheme worked well enough to earn us some additional 'pocket money'. The website is forever preserved by Tripod (at some point we stopped, but never removed the website): http://linuxlop.tripod.com http://linuxlop.tripod.com We did get some complaints from people who were convinced that selling Linux distributions was illegal ;).
- mindcrime 7y agoWe did get some complaints from people who were convinced that selling Linux distributions was illegal I was a C.S. student at UNC-Wilmington when RedHat first launched, and I remember a lot of people were freaked out about that. They were just howling "they're SELLING Linux?!???!" Heh.
- tmountain 7y agoLove this.
- gregoriol 7y agoI'm wondering why they need "dual 20 core processors, 786GB of memory" to serve FTP?
- tyingq 7y agoOperated by csc.fi, so it's perhaps just the standard server for a science oriented org. Or a maybe a "hand me down" from them.
- tow21 7y agoSo I actually live (and am typing this) about 5 minutes walk from the CSC head office in Keilaranta, which I can see out of my window. I wonder if the machine is physically located there. (I'm pretty sure my first linux kernel download was 1997, one of the 2.0-pre series, and it probably came from funet.fi)
- userbinator 7y agoThey can serve a lot of users simultaneously. Most of that RAM will be file cache.
- saltcured 7y agoYup, the niche science site may have a big working set for a single server to handle a worldwide random workload, but it is still cost effective versus trying to pay for a CDN that will have such low user density. The conventional science community approach is volunteer mirror sites. We could have many benefits of a CDN without the big recurring costs.
- ville 7y agoFTP is not the only service provided, see http://ftp.funet.fi/README http://ftp.funet.fi/README
- Fnoord 7y agoAlso see [1] Very old (inter)network, also ran an IRC server back in the days. IRCnet IIRC [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUNET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUNET
- npongratz 7y agoI don't know why I feel compelled to mention it, but 1791991 is a prime number.
- kgwxd 7y agoHow did you realize that?
- kittiepryde 7y agoI wanted to verify it too, if you Google '1791991 prime', the search page answers 'Yes'.
- npongratz 7y agoYeah, I indeed Googled it [0]. Wolfram Alpha is also a quick way to verify, just query the number: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1791991 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1791991 [0] I thought to check because I instantly knew the number was not divisible by 3 (since 1+7+1+1 % 3 = 1), and at that point it's just quicker to look it up than run through the other primes up to sqrt(1791991).
- katet 7y agoI was born 17.09.1990, exactly a year off. I grew up with Linux and am eternally grateful to the "scene" surrounding the magazine CDs with - I don't know - like 17 distros packed in together and endless tutorials on each of them. It's also amusing how many people - my age or so - use Ubuntu as a daily driver these days that never went through the pain of configuring LILO or Broadcom drivers from source in Slackware ;)
- cdnuzzo 7y agoThis is cool. I remember my first distro was Mint like most. My story if curious: https://craignuzzo.tech/my-linux-life-journey/ https://craignuzzo.tech/my-linux-life-journey/
- errnoh 7y agoA lot of quality photos of old maps in one of the links: http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/sci/geo/carto/maakirjakartat/ http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/sci/geo/carto/maakirjakartat/ For example a book of old maps dated to 1643.
- spacedcowboy 7y agoI was using Linux before things like Slackware came about, when it was just a boot and a root floppy disk. We had DECstation 3100/5000 machines costing small fortunes, that couldn’t reliably write a CD. The small 386 in the corner running “that newfangled thing” was far better at this :) In my lifetime, I’ve gone through: - building (as in: soldering chips to a motherboard) my own computer at home at age 11* - buying an 8-bit Atari and learning about Antic and the 6502 - eventually getting a “disk drive” which stored an entire 128k - moving onto a 32-bit cpu with the Atari ST - blowing my student budget for the term on a hard disk, 20MB - finally getting connected, at the blazing speed of 2048 baud - lather, upgrade, rinse, repeat - to where I have a 1gbit internet connection, a 10gbit home network, 100TB of storage locally, and a server rack in the garage with more than 100 “cores” available. Things have changed so much, so quickly, relatively speaking.
- spacedcowboy 7y ago[This is the ‘*’ from above. I couldn’t get ‘edit’ to accept it as an update, it just kept on putting the original text back, so...] My parents bought me a black-and-white TV and a computer kit (they couldn’t afford both the TV and the already-assembled version) for Xmas at age 11. The big gift here was the TV, as far as I was concerned, we only had the one downstairs before that, and I got one in my bedroom! I even convinced myself I could watch snooker on a black & white TV, even if you did have to tune it by turning a dial until the picture appeared :) About a month later, they were getting at me to put the computer together, which was the main present in their eyes - the TV was second-hand. Grumbling, I did so, and got it working. Once I’d told them, the whole family wanted to see this new technological marvel, so I took it downstairs, plugged it into the main TV, and everyone gathered around. I typed in what the manual had told me to do, to test things out PRINT 2+2=4 To which it displayed “1”. And I turned round to the family expecting all the validation an 11 year old desired. My dad looked at me, looked at the screen, and just said “I knew it, you’ve buggered it” and walked out the room. It took me a few days to convince him that “1” was the right answer. To this day, I think his mistrust in computers stems from that episode. He was a docker in a Northern city, and all he’d say for years afterwards was “you can’t trust those bloody things” in ... more colourful... language.
- mindcrime 7y agoAh yeah, the good old days. Yggdrasil Linux, Turbo Linux, Slackware, etc. I think I installed my first Linux system in 1996 (maybe 1997) and never looked back. I didn't drop all use of OS/2 and Windows immediately, but by 2001 I had adopted Linux as my fulltime desktop OS and to this day it's all I use, outside of situations ($DAYJOB mostly) where I'm required to use something else. I wonder if Linus had any idea of the impact his "toy project" would have on the world?
- space_ghost 7y agoGot my first copy of Linux (Debian Potato!) in early 2002. I'd known about it for years thanks to second-hand computer magazines and the excellent (in retrospect) ZDTV, and it definitely lived up to the hype.
- war1025 7y agoZDTV was amazing. First I learned about Linux was from "The ScreenSavers". Loved that show. I think my first functioning Linux install was Debian Sarge in maybe 2005. I remember the first time I got it to boot and it was just the command line that I had working, but it felt like freaking magic. Those were the days too of Compiz and all that fun. It was mind blowing to realize that there was an alternative to Windows that not only looked fancier but had free access to things like compilers and interpreters. Definitely started me down the path to my current programming career.
- jhallenworld 7y agoWe used Linux in a product before it had a network stack. We did need networking, and used KA9Q to do it. We also used rz / sz (zmodem protocol) for file transfer over phone lines. I recently integrated zmodem into an embedded system for firmware updates over a serial port- it's still very useful. The performance of the floppy drive was terrible at first- a friend of mine and I added buffering, so that it could read a track at a time instead of block at time (which caused it to read only one block per disk rotation). For the same project my friend created the generic SCSI driver that still exists today. It allowed us to connect a medical film scanner to Linux.
- riffic 7y agowhat does 17.9.1991 mean? Can I suggest people stop coming up with their novel date formatting schemes and use a standard that universally makes sense? ISO 8601 is worth looking at: https://xkcd.com/1179/ https://xkcd.com/1179/
- mulmen 7y agoDay month year is a common date format in much of the world. I think they should write the year as 9191 for consistency but I’m not willing to die on that hill.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- opan 7y agoI agree, but 17 being greater than 12 and the year being 4 digits reveals the order in this case. This only works sometimes, though. Like how 14 o'clock is pretty clear, but because not everyone uses 24 hour time yet, 2 o'clock is actually ambiguous. I find a leading 0 helps, but in spoken conversation it's not so simple.
- mulmen 7y agoWhere is fourteen-o-clock common? I've never heard 24 hour time spoken that way.
- Symbiote 7y agoNot in English, but the direct translation is used in other European languages. Danish: klokken 14 German: 14 Uhr That does mean native speakers of languages like this might say "14 o'clock" when speaking English. I very occasionally use this if I need to be certain to be understood by someone who rarely speaks English, "we'll arrive at 19 o'clock". (A friend's parents in rural rest-of-Europe, for example.)
- Symbiote 7y agoIt's hardly novel. This ordering goes back centuries, and is used by the majority of the world. The ISO standard is great for data exchange, but it's unlikely to change how dates are normally spoken and casually written.
- willtim 7y agoI remember buying "Linux - unleashing the workstation in your PC" circa '94 which had the tag line "friends don't let friends use DOS !". I was quite stunned at how much better it was than DOS/Windows at the time. I've been a Linux user ever since!
- mmcgaha 7y agoThe disk distributed with that book was linux universe. For me, it was the first easy to use linux distribution.
- app4soft 7y agoOne of the most interesting folder on Funet archive is mirror of Simtel[0] FTP-serever[1]: there are a lot of very interesting software for various old platforms. Especially interesting — there are some very cool CAD, GIS and graphics apps or MS-DOS, Windows (from 3.1 to XP).[2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simtel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simtel [1] ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/Archived/simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/ [2] https://twitter.com/app4soft/status/1240002398577397772 https://twitter.com/app4soft/status/1240002398577397772
- teddyh 7y agoHTTP link to that Simtel mirror: https://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/msdos/Simtel/pub/simtelnet/ https://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/msdos/Simtel/pub/simtelnet/
- app4soft 7y agoNO! You linked wrong directory! Here are correct HTTPS link to Simtelnet mirror.[0] Also just discovered that Simtelnet mirror on Sunet is more complete.[1] [0] https://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/Archived/simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/ https://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/Archived/simtel.net/pub... [1] https://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/simtelnet/ https://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/simteln...
- alexellisuk 7y agoThese specs, and runs over HTTP.. and is likely written in VIM, in unformatted HTML. > It runs on a Linux server with dual 20 core processors, 786GB of memory and 80+TB of NetApp NFS storage. > It has a 2 x 25Gbit/s connection to the Funet backbone.
- effnorwood 7y agoThat isn’t a valid IP address