6 ms·

Linux’s History (1992)

88 points by indigodaddy 6y ago

smegcicle 6y ago
tl;dr starts with a little background before the "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu" post and describes the progression for the next ~year, including a response to someone asking how to go about starting a similar project Very cool that it went from disk drivers to being able to run X in that time
- trashburger 6y ago
  Software was a lot less complex back then. Try running gcc on a brand new kernel nowadays - it will probably be a year's worth of work!
copperx 6y ago
One thing I have never understood (and haven't looked into) is how can Linux be so portable, when it was specifically built with x86 in mind?
- jhbadger 6y ago
  The first versions weren't. It wasn't until people wanted to port it to the DEC Alpha architecture in 1995 that the changes that they proposed ended up removing a lot of the X86 dependencies. That made further ports much easier.
  - LukeShu 6y ago
    > It wasn't until people wanted to port it to the DEC Alpha architecture in 1995 that the changes that they proposed ended up removing a lot of the X86 dependencies. The m68k port started in 1993 when people wanted to run Linux on their Amiga computers, and Linux/m68k was under lively development in 1994, supporting Amiga and Atari computers.
  - jmclnx 6y ago
    And I believe DEC gave Linux a 1 or 2 alpha systems to work on the port
- jlokier 6y ago
  Being mostly written in C was key. Though it was written for x86 initially, it was nearly all C, with GCC extensions and macros/inline functions containing a tiny bit of inline assembly where x86 instructions were needed. That made it easy to port to other architectures as soon as someone was motivated, by replacing macro/inline definitions, the bootloader, entry/exit/interrupt paths, and simple architecture-specific device drivers such as keyboard and console. If Linus had said no, it would have been difficult, as there were many changes that needed to be maintained for each new architecture, and internal APIs that needed changing to help them perform well. Luckily Linus was happy to accommodate new architecture changes as people did the ports, and over many years the internal APIs gradually shed their x86-flavoured semantics to become more portable.
- swiley 6y ago
  It's something that turned out to be easy and legal to hack on (with businesses that otherwise wouldn't share code being compelled to.) So the answer is: because people wanted it to be portable.
- guenthert 6y ago
  BSD Unix was originally written for the DEC VAX, which left its mark on e.g. the virtual memory subsystem. Just because it was written for a specific architecture, doesn't mean it cannot be ported to other (at least similar) architectures.
IvyMike 6y ago
My Linus story from this era: my brother had a brand new 486, and when he got it, he managed to convince my parents to get him a second hard drive, so that he could run Linux. We did not understand the idea of disk partitions at the time, and I don't even remember the exact details--I believe we booted from floppy to get into Linux. After spending a couple of days on tech support figuring out how to set the master/slave jumpers on the drives, we felt like we were making good progress. That's right, not all drives labeled their jumpers, and given that the web was a few years from being invented, there were not any support websites on which we could look up that info, so phone was the only way. Next, we spent a week going to the UIUC CCSO computer lab and downloading slackware floppies. We installed them, and managed to get everything up and running... until we tried getting X to run. We had a strange 800x600 monitor, and getting the dot clocks right was another week of trial-and-error. The dot clock hurdle surmounted, another problem: almost anything "big" we did under X would pretty quickly cause a kernel panic. So what did we do? We followed what the README file in Linux said to do: we emailed Linus Torvalds the panic message. A few hours later, we had a response. Linus noticed that the crashes were all with pointers with a value of 0x08000000 (or whatever) which most likely was supposed to be a null pointer, but one of our SIMMs probably had a bit-stuck-at-1 error. He apologized for not being able to tell us which SIMM in the system it was, but encouraged us to swap hardware. The local computer store sales guys were unimpressed that LINUS TORVALDS HIMSELF had told us we bad memory, but we eventually got them to do a warranty exchange, probably just to get us to go away. And I'm 100% sure those modules found themselves in the next system they built for a different customer. New SIMM modules in hand and the problem was resolved!
- andi999 6y ago
  You had internet? You lucky ....
  - IvyMike 6y ago
    I was luckier than I deserved. I pretty much chanced into going to UIUC, which was home to an NCSA supercomputing center and thus was directly on the NSFNet. So not only did we have internet, but it was mind-blowingly fast. The university was connected via 1.5Mbps T1 when I started, soon upgraded to an ultra-luxurious 45Mbps T3. Let me stress... this was for the entire university of 35K+ students. More on the early NSFNet topology and speeds in those days: http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/~hwb/NSFNET/NSFNET-200711Summary/ http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/~hwb/NSFNET/NSFNET-200711Summary/
ansible 6y ago
I was using Coherent, a Unix-like operating system famous for its thick manual in the early 1990s. I eventually switched over to Linux due to the limitations like networking. I had wanted to set up an NFS server at home. I bought a set of 5.25in floppies from someone advertising on Usenet. The distribution was Softlanding Systems (SLS) with Linux kernel version 0.99pl13. switched to Slackware shortly after that, though I tried most of the popular ones at some point in the 1990s.
- cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  I too used SLS in the early days, and before that I believe MCC Interim Linux. Then eventually Debian after SLS, a year or two after it came on the scene. I believe the first kernel version I had installed was 0.97ish. Definitely a.out pre-elf era, X didn't work yet (at least for me). X was always a hassle with my Trident 8900 card. Modelines and all that. Wish I remembered more. And wish I could have been more focused and done some real programming and contributed back. I mainly spent my time on MUDs, MOOs, and IRC, and tinkered in an unfocused way in C without accomplishing much concrete. Man those were cool times tho.
  - bch 6y ago
    > Definitely a.out pre-elf era Ignorant of the details of a.out vs elf, when the switchover was being discussed I thought this was a decision I’d have to make and agonized over what to choose, hoping I didn’t pick Beta while everybody else went VHS.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    My first Linux was Slackware 2.0, which I got via the first edition of Linux Unleashed book, and it had a big sticker bragging about being the first Slackware release with elf support. I shared your Trident woes, having a Trident 9000, couldn't set it beyond 640x480, whereas I was already on 800x600 on Windows 95, on a 14" monitor.
    - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
      Yes the modeline thing was the worst; I could never understand (and I haven't gone back to analyze now) why it was that Windows could manage screen resolutions and modes automagically but X required manually futzing with the X config to make it work. It took a half decade or more before any of this just worked out of the box.
Baarsella 6y ago
Good read, not very easy on the eyes though.
pjmlp 6y ago
Also relevant for its adoption, > Adoption of Linux in production environments, rather than being used only by hobbyists, started to take off first in the mid-1990s in the supercomputing community, where organizations such as NASA started to replace their increasingly expensive machines with clusters of inexpensive commodity computers running Linux. Commercial use began when Dell and IBM, followed by Hewlett-Packard, started offering Linux support to escape Microsoft's monopoly in the desktop operating system market.[50] -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Commercial_and_popular_uptake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Commercial_and_popular_u...
- kiliantics 6y ago
  If adoption first started in the less well-resourced academic organisations, I wonder if that commercial shift is connected with the pattern of more and more tech-types moving from academia into industry -- due to a growing lack of opportunity in the academic hierarchy -- bringing their Linux know-how into the large companies.
MrXOR 6y ago
For Linux’s history, beside Mr Black's link, I strongly recommend to read "Just for Fun"[1] and watch Revolution OS[2][3]. [1]https://www.amazon.com/Just-Fun-Story-Accidental-Revolutionary/dp/0066620732 https://www.amazon.com/Just-Fun-Story-Accidental-Revolutiona... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_OS [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vW62KqKJ5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vW62KqKJ5A

88 points by indigodaddy 6y ago

tl;dr starts with a little background before the "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu" post and describes the progression for the next ~year, including a response to someone asking how to go about starting a similar project Very cool that it went from disk drivers to being able to run X in that time

trashburger 6y ago
Software was a lot less complex back then. Try running gcc on a brand new kernel nowadays - it will probably be a year's worth of work!

copperx 6y ago

One thing I have never understood (and haven't looked into) is how can Linux be so portable, when it was specifically built with x86 in mind?

jhbadger 6y ago
The first versions weren't. It wasn't until people wanted to port it to the DEC Alpha architecture in 1995 that the changes that they proposed ended up removing a lot of the X86 dependencies. That made further ports much easier.
- LukeShu 6y ago
  > It wasn't until people wanted to port it to the DEC Alpha architecture in 1995 that the changes that they proposed ended up removing a lot of the X86 dependencies. The m68k port started in 1993 when people wanted to run Linux on their Amiga computers, and Linux/m68k was under lively development in 1994, supporting Amiga and Atari computers.
- jmclnx 6y ago
  And I believe DEC gave Linux a 1 or 2 alpha systems to work on the port
jlokier 6y ago
Being mostly written in C was key. Though it was written for x86 initially, it was nearly all C, with GCC extensions and macros/inline functions containing a tiny bit of inline assembly where x86 instructions were needed. That made it easy to port to other architectures as soon as someone was motivated, by replacing macro/inline definitions, the bootloader, entry/exit/interrupt paths, and simple architecture-specific device drivers such as keyboard and console. If Linus had said no, it would have been difficult, as there were many changes that needed to be maintained for each new architecture, and internal APIs that needed changing to help them perform well. Luckily Linus was happy to accommodate new architecture changes as people did the ports, and over many years the internal APIs gradually shed their x86-flavoured semantics to become more portable.
swiley 6y ago
It's something that turned out to be easy and legal to hack on (with businesses that otherwise wouldn't share code being compelled to.) So the answer is: because people wanted it to be portable.
guenthert 6y ago
BSD Unix was originally written for the DEC VAX, which left its mark on e.g. the virtual memory subsystem. Just because it was written for a specific architecture, doesn't mean it cannot be ported to other (at least similar) architectures.

IvyMike 6y ago

My Linus story from this era: my brother had a brand new 486, and when he got it, he managed to convince my parents to get him a second hard drive, so that he could run Linux. We did not understand the idea of disk partitions at the time, and I don't even remember the exact details--I believe we booted from floppy to get into Linux. After spending a couple of days on tech support figuring out how to set the master/slave jumpers on the drives, we felt like we were making good progress. That's right, not all drives labeled their jumpers, and given that the web was a few years from being invented, there were not any support websites on which we could look up that info, so phone was the only way. Next, we spent a week going to the UIUC CCSO computer lab and downloading slackware floppies. We installed them, and managed to get everything up and running... until we tried getting X to run. We had a strange 800x600 monitor, and getting the dot clocks right was another week of trial-and-error. The dot clock hurdle surmounted, another problem: almost anything "big" we did under X would pretty quickly cause a kernel panic. So what did we do? We followed what the README file in Linux said to do: we emailed Linus Torvalds the panic message. A few hours later, we had a response. Linus noticed that the crashes were all with pointers with a value of 0x08000000 (or whatever) which most likely was supposed to be a null pointer, but one of our SIMMs probably had a bit-stuck-at-1 error. He apologized for not being able to tell us which SIMM in the system it was, but encouraged us to swap hardware. The local computer store sales guys were unimpressed that LINUS TORVALDS HIMSELF had told us we bad memory, but we eventually got them to do a warranty exchange, probably just to get us to go away. And I'm 100% sure those modules found themselves in the next system they built for a different customer. New SIMM modules in hand and the problem was resolved!

andi999 6y ago
You had internet? You lucky ....
- IvyMike 6y ago
  I was luckier than I deserved. I pretty much chanced into going to UIUC, which was home to an NCSA supercomputing center and thus was directly on the NSFNet. So not only did we have internet, but it was mind-blowingly fast. The university was connected via 1.5Mbps T1 when I started, soon upgraded to an ultra-luxurious 45Mbps T3. Let me stress... this was for the entire university of 35K+ students. More on the early NSFNet topology and speeds in those days: http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/~hwb/NSFNET/NSFNET-200711Summary/ http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/~hwb/NSFNET/NSFNET-200711Summary/

ansible 6y ago

I was using Coherent, a Unix-like operating system famous for its thick manual in the early 1990s. I eventually switched over to Linux due to the limitations like networking. I had wanted to set up an NFS server at home. I bought a set of 5.25in floppies from someone advertising on Usenet. The distribution was Softlanding Systems (SLS) with Linux kernel version 0.99pl13. switched to Slackware shortly after that, though I tried most of the popular ones at some point in the 1990s.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago
I too used SLS in the early days, and before that I believe MCC Interim Linux. Then eventually Debian after SLS, a year or two after it came on the scene. I believe the first kernel version I had installed was 0.97ish. Definitely a.out pre-elf era, X didn't work yet (at least for me). X was always a hassle with my Trident 8900 card. Modelines and all that. Wish I remembered more. And wish I could have been more focused and done some real programming and contributed back. I mainly spent my time on MUDs, MOOs, and IRC, and tinkered in an unfocused way in C without accomplishing much concrete. Man those were cool times tho.
- bch 6y ago
  > Definitely a.out pre-elf era Ignorant of the details of a.out vs elf, when the switchover was being discussed I thought this was a decision I’d have to make and agonized over what to choose, hoping I didn’t pick Beta while everybody else went VHS.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  My first Linux was Slackware 2.0, which I got via the first edition of Linux Unleashed book, and it had a big sticker bragging about being the first Slackware release with elf support. I shared your Trident woes, having a Trident 9000, couldn't set it beyond 640x480, whereas I was already on 800x600 on Windows 95, on a 14" monitor.
  - cmrdporcupine 6y ago
    Yes the modeline thing was the worst; I could never understand (and I haven't gone back to analyze now) why it was that Windows could manage screen resolutions and modes automagically but X required manually futzing with the X config to make it work. It took a half decade or more before any of this just worked out of the box.

Baarsella 6y ago

Good read, not very easy on the eyes though.

pjmlp 6y ago

Also relevant for its adoption, > Adoption of Linux in production environments, rather than being used only by hobbyists, started to take off first in the mid-1990s in the supercomputing community, where organizations such as NASA started to replace their increasingly expensive machines with clusters of inexpensive commodity computers running Linux. Commercial use began when Dell and IBM, followed by Hewlett-Packard, started offering Linux support to escape Microsoft's monopoly in the desktop operating system market.[50] -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Commercial_and_popular_uptake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Commercial_and_popular_u...

kiliantics 6y ago
If adoption first started in the less well-resourced academic organisations, I wonder if that commercial shift is connected with the pattern of more and more tech-types moving from academia into industry -- due to a growing lack of opportunity in the academic hierarchy -- bringing their Linux know-how into the large companies.

MrXOR 6y ago

For Linux’s history, beside Mr Black's link, I strongly recommend to read "Just for Fun"[1] and watch Revolution OS[2][3]. [1]https://www.amazon.com/Just-Fun-Story-Accidental-Revolutionary/dp/0066620732 https://www.amazon.com/Just-Fun-Story-Accidental-Revolutiona... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_OS [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vW62KqKJ5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vW62KqKJ5A