6 ms·

I recall being in a B. Dalton Bookstore in the mid-90's. I picked up a book that had "Linux" on the cover. In the cover it had a floppy disk or two. Something f

I recall being in a B. Dalton Bookstore in the mid-90's. I picked up a book that had "Linux" on the cover. In the cover it had a floppy disk or two. Something felt very wrong to me. You can't give away an entire operation system! Perhaps this was just some "free for educational purposes" thing? I went home and fired up WebCrawler on AOL and came across Yggdrasil. I had experienced Unix on an SGI system. And I was very familiar with AmigaOS, so this idea of a free Unix-like OS that I could install on commodity hardware was intriguing. A friend of mine bought the RedHat 5.2 distro from Best Buy and offered to let me borrow the CD-ROM. I was like, "that's piracy... no thanks". He said, "no, dude... you don't get it. It's free.". Looking back, I sometimes think. "How could you have been so into computers and NOT known about this???" Then I remember. Information just didn't travel as freely in those days. It was simply possible not to know things. Even though I read computer magazines, they were VERY focused on Windows or Mac. Once I found a distro I could install from floppies (Dragon Linux I think) I messed around until I got X running. Then it was CD-ROMs from CheapBytes and LinuxMall. In 1998 and 1999 I bet I installed every distro one could buy for 2 dollars on CD-ROM! I was a full time user. I have been ever since.

hef19898 5y ago
I remember discussions back the day between Linux and Windows proponents. I was clearly in the Windows camp, seeing Linux fans as, well, bizarre sometimes arrogant pseudo programmers. That changed, now that Linux is probably the last OS I can run without a cloud account easily. Heck, I'd even pay for it! Back the day I was a gamer, the main reason why Linux never really was an option. Later for work, it was Windows all the way for obvious reasons. Privately I am on Ubuntu now, along with LibreOffice. Won't go back, Windows turned into a major PIA when I tried to run different Teams and Office accounts not linked to the Windows 10 license due to home schooling and two kids. Gone were the days that a license key was all you needed. There is still a Windows boot partition, company hardware is Windows anyway. The only thing I have a hard time getting rid of is Excel. I am so used to that...
- tomrod 5y ago
  MS really needs to release a Linux Excel.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    Not sure if that's ever gonna happen. I could imagine, now that Steam tool care of a huge junk of gaming, Office is the main thing keeping a sizable number of people on Windows. Imagine if MS was reduced to MS Excel...
    - orangepurple 5y ago
      Microsoft is mostly reduced to the Office and Cloud teams. It's likely why the Windows UI is an inconsistent disaster.
      - hef19898 5y ago
        Seems reasonable. And to be honest, Teams is good for professional collaboration. And the MS Office suite isn't too bad. I used to be soslo founder until recently, and for that Office 365 was just perfect. No VPN, no really worries about it security. And even pricing was, I'd say, reasonable. Customer service is shit show, so.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        It was always like that since the Windows days, Office drove the next UI improvements which would later appear as Windows common controls. The current UI chaos is because the Windows team has become mostly the Cloud team, while the UI frameworks seem to keep rotating new people every couple of years. They had to literally restaff WinForms and WPF teams from scratch, and then merged them with WinUI/UWP!
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      Once they have ported it to Electron ...
  - monocasa 5y ago
dharmab 5y ago
The most single life-changing purchase of my life was probably a Linux magazine that included an Ubuntu DVD from the bookstore.
dkarl 5y ago
In the spirit of "how could I not have known that:" back in college there was a terminal in a room in the physics department basement where I could log in and check my email. Nearby was a bookshelf with a bunch of tattered books that seemed to have been left by former students. Some Asimov, some Douglas Adams, books about Fortran and C, and a book about Unix. Absent-mindedly flipping through those books one day (as one did before one discovered the web) I noticed that the Unix command line prompt looked like what I saw when I logged in to read my mail. Huh. I tried some things from the book, and they worked just like Unix was supposed to. This thing I had been using to check my email all year could do other stuff! That was really cool, but not all that personally useful to me, until I read something in the book that made me realize there was probably a C compiler. There was! Even better, there was a C++ compiler. From then on I was hooked. Programming for me had been a hobby before I came to college, a way of avoiding real work. I had heard of C++ and wanted to learn it, but I had read that the compilers were really expensive, and I was afraid of asking my parents to buy me one. Here was one I could use for free! So naturally I ended up spending a lot of hours writing C++ code in that basement instead of doing my math and physics work, and that's how I acquired the skills that landed me my first job. As for Linux, there was a CS major in my dorm who installed Linux and BeOS on his PC and did his programming assignments on them, but I never had the courage to do that, because I was afraid that if I screwed up my computer and couldn't immediately fix it, it would mess up my work for other classes. I didn't take that risk until years later, when I no longer had to turn in writing assignments in Microsoft Word format.
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  Wow, very similar experience here with the email-terminal starting point, except instead of the C compiler, which was indeed a pretty awesome discovery, I discovered I could write shell scripts, just like those described by hacker-hunter Cliff Stoll. I had been writing DOS batch files with the help of PC Magazine utils for years, and shell scripts looked absolutely amazing. From that point on I pretty much always had to know where I could go to get unix or Linux shell access...
banana_giraffe 5y ago
I had a very similar "I can get a whole operating system for free?" eye opening experience when I got Slackware on a bunch of floppies. I also picked tcsh for my main shell based off some blurb I read and spent a few months unlearning what I learned when I was actually given a task to maintain a Linux system a few years later.
earksiinni 5y ago
> A friend of mine bought the RedHat 5.2 distro from Best Buy Ahh wow, this brings me back. I bought, or rather had my parents buy, this exact same package from Best Buy when I was in high school or maybe the end of middle school. I remember thinking in the store that it was impossible for there to be something that wasn't Windows or Mac, and the packaging was so cool. These were also the "10,000 Best Windows Games" shareware CD-ROM days (anyone remember the Aztech Cube pack? [1]) I was fascinated by the fact that Red Hat came with thousands of "packages" that weren't shareware. And that thicc documentation, wow so sexy. A printed catalog with info on each package. I remember feeling a sense of limitless possibility while flipping through its pages. Installed Red Hat on a Pentium 1 Baby-AT tower that I picked up from Goodwill for $20. My friend and I spray painted it that summer and I slapped a 52x Creative Technologies branded CD-ROM drive with a cable that connected directly to a genuine Creative SoundBlaster sound card for music CD playback. I remember thinking how cool I was to have a Creative CD-ROM drive working with my Creative SoundBlaster playing Vertical Horizon's "Everything You Want" on Linux. All I needed was a KVM switch to play Civ 2 on my junkyard Win 95 Gateway pizza box sitting next to it. Wild times. [1]: https://www.mobygames.com/company/aztech-new-media-corp https://www.mobygames.com/company/aztech-new-media-corp
- nobleach 5y ago
  Vertical Horizon's "Everything You Want" specifically spoke to me here because that was the EXACT era!!! I know I ripped that song using a connection of Perl scripts, then used LAME encoder in connection with some lyrics fetching script to encode the lyrics into the mp3 metadata.
13of40 5y ago
I used Linux for the first time around 1993, and had it installed on a 386SX(?) with a satisfying amber monochrome screen, both of which I got for less than $100 total, IIRC. Anyway, I had a friend whose mother ran a small data processing business, and it was known in our circle of nerd friends that she was in possession of a "real Unix machine". And what a machine it was - a beige box the size of a small car, with intriguing lights and cables and powerful hums and clicks. Anyway, I told her about this "Linux" thing, and she dismissed it as fantasy, so I brought my computer around to her office and gave her a demo. The only comment I recall her making was something like, "Well, looks like you got yourself a $100 Unix machine." I could tell in her eyes, though, that she was feeling the world shift, heavily, from one epoch to the next.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I didn't use Linux proper until 2000. I had used Minix in around 1988/89 for an operating systems class. Never struck me as odd to be running a unix on my 8088 PC with 1 floppy drive. At the time it just seemed like a more powerful DOS.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
I had a teacher I was talking to (he looked kinda young to me) and he said he remembered when he first used linux when it had come out. What was mind blowing to me was that it was in his lifetime right after I was born.
ASalazarMX 5y ago
I knew about Linux before trying it, so the free part was no surprise. My uncanny valley was being able to recompile the kernel with any options I wanted to; that felt both cool and unnatural, like "why aren't protecting their source code?".
- rufus_foreman 5y ago
  Building from source was the fun part when I first got into Linux. Trying to get the modules down to the smallest subset possible that would run on my machine just to see how fast I could get it to boot. Tricky part was it was a dual boot Windows installation on a single hard drive, I was always worried I would screw something up that I couldn't recover from since I needed the computer for school. Somehow I didn't mess up anything I couldn't recover from.
- krylon 5y ago
  Ah, that brings back memories. Compiling your own kernel was kind of a rite of passage back in the day. Now I cannot remember when I last did that. Must have been 14 years or so, when I was still using Gentoo.
  - anthk 5y ago
    I did that a few years ago for a semi-bricked WM8850 netbook which I can't reflash with Uberoid, a custom Android for these ARM machines. So I set up a VFAT partition with the kernel, a boot image file, and maybe I'll add some Void Linux root filesystem on an ext3 partition tomorrow. It's worse because booting from an SD card is not very realiable, but it's better than nothing.

hef19898 5y ago

I remember discussions back the day between Linux and Windows proponents. I was clearly in the Windows camp, seeing Linux fans as, well, bizarre sometimes arrogant pseudo programmers. That changed, now that Linux is probably the last OS I can run without a cloud account easily. Heck, I'd even pay for it! Back the day I was a gamer, the main reason why Linux never really was an option. Later for work, it was Windows all the way for obvious reasons. Privately I am on Ubuntu now, along with LibreOffice. Won't go back, Windows turned into a major PIA when I tried to run different Teams and Office accounts not linked to the Windows 10 license due to home schooling and two kids. Gone were the days that a license key was all you needed. There is still a Windows boot partition, company hardware is Windows anyway. The only thing I have a hard time getting rid of is Excel. I am so used to that...

tomrod 5y ago
MS really needs to release a Linux Excel.
- hef19898 5y ago
  Not sure if that's ever gonna happen. I could imagine, now that Steam tool care of a huge junk of gaming, Office is the main thing keeping a sizable number of people on Windows. Imagine if MS was reduced to MS Excel...
  - orangepurple 5y ago
    Microsoft is mostly reduced to the Office and Cloud teams. It's likely why the Windows UI is an inconsistent disaster.
    - hef19898 5y ago
      Seems reasonable. And to be honest, Teams is good for professional collaboration. And the MS Office suite isn't too bad. I used to be soslo founder until recently, and for that Office 365 was just perfect. No VPN, no really worries about it security. And even pricing was, I'd say, reasonable. Customer service is shit show, so.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      It was always like that since the Windows days, Office drove the next UI improvements which would later appear as Windows common controls. The current UI chaos is because the Windows team has become mostly the Cloud team, while the UI frameworks seem to keep rotating new people every couple of years. They had to literally restaff WinForms and WPF teams from scratch, and then merged them with WinUI/UWP!
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Once they have ported it to Electron ...
- monocasa 5y ago

dharmab 5y ago

The most single life-changing purchase of my life was probably a Linux magazine that included an Ubuntu DVD from the bookstore.

dkarl 5y ago

In the spirit of "how could I not have known that:" back in college there was a terminal in a room in the physics department basement where I could log in and check my email. Nearby was a bookshelf with a bunch of tattered books that seemed to have been left by former students. Some Asimov, some Douglas Adams, books about Fortran and C, and a book about Unix. Absent-mindedly flipping through those books one day (as one did before one discovered the web) I noticed that the Unix command line prompt looked like what I saw when I logged in to read my mail. Huh. I tried some things from the book, and they worked just like Unix was supposed to. This thing I had been using to check my email all year could do other stuff! That was really cool, but not all that personally useful to me, until I read something in the book that made me realize there was probably a C compiler. There was! Even better, there was a C++ compiler. From then on I was hooked. Programming for me had been a hobby before I came to college, a way of avoiding real work. I had heard of C++ and wanted to learn it, but I had read that the compilers were really expensive, and I was afraid of asking my parents to buy me one. Here was one I could use for free! So naturally I ended up spending a lot of hours writing C++ code in that basement instead of doing my math and physics work, and that's how I acquired the skills that landed me my first job. As for Linux, there was a CS major in my dorm who installed Linux and BeOS on his PC and did his programming assignments on them, but I never had the courage to do that, because I was afraid that if I screwed up my computer and couldn't immediately fix it, it would mess up my work for other classes. I didn't take that risk until years later, when I no longer had to turn in writing assignments in Microsoft Word format.

themodelplumber 5y ago
Wow, very similar experience here with the email-terminal starting point, except instead of the C compiler, which was indeed a pretty awesome discovery, I discovered I could write shell scripts, just like those described by hacker-hunter Cliff Stoll. I had been writing DOS batch files with the help of PC Magazine utils for years, and shell scripts looked absolutely amazing. From that point on I pretty much always had to know where I could go to get unix or Linux shell access...

banana_giraffe 5y ago

I had a very similar "I can get a whole operating system for free?" eye opening experience when I got Slackware on a bunch of floppies. I also picked tcsh for my main shell based off some blurb I read and spent a few months unlearning what I learned when I was actually given a task to maintain a Linux system a few years later.

earksiinni 5y ago

> A friend of mine bought the RedHat 5.2 distro from Best Buy Ahh wow, this brings me back. I bought, or rather had my parents buy, this exact same package from Best Buy when I was in high school or maybe the end of middle school. I remember thinking in the store that it was impossible for there to be something that wasn't Windows or Mac, and the packaging was so cool. These were also the "10,000 Best Windows Games" shareware CD-ROM days (anyone remember the Aztech Cube pack? [1]) I was fascinated by the fact that Red Hat came with thousands of "packages" that weren't shareware. And that thicc documentation, wow so sexy. A printed catalog with info on each package. I remember feeling a sense of limitless possibility while flipping through its pages. Installed Red Hat on a Pentium 1 Baby-AT tower that I picked up from Goodwill for $20. My friend and I spray painted it that summer and I slapped a 52x Creative Technologies branded CD-ROM drive with a cable that connected directly to a genuine Creative SoundBlaster sound card for music CD playback. I remember thinking how cool I was to have a Creative CD-ROM drive working with my Creative SoundBlaster playing Vertical Horizon's "Everything You Want" on Linux. All I needed was a KVM switch to play Civ 2 on my junkyard Win 95 Gateway pizza box sitting next to it. Wild times. [1]: https://www.mobygames.com/company/aztech-new-media-corp https://www.mobygames.com/company/aztech-new-media-corp

nobleach 5y ago
Vertical Horizon's "Everything You Want" specifically spoke to me here because that was the EXACT era!!! I know I ripped that song using a connection of Perl scripts, then used LAME encoder in connection with some lyrics fetching script to encode the lyrics into the mp3 metadata.

13of40 5y ago

I used Linux for the first time around 1993, and had it installed on a 386SX(?) with a satisfying amber monochrome screen, both of which I got for less than $100 total, IIRC. Anyway, I had a friend whose mother ran a small data processing business, and it was known in our circle of nerd friends that she was in possession of a "real Unix machine". And what a machine it was - a beige box the size of a small car, with intriguing lights and cables and powerful hums and clicks. Anyway, I told her about this "Linux" thing, and she dismissed it as fantasy, so I brought my computer around to her office and gave her a demo. The only comment I recall her making was something like, "Well, looks like you got yourself a $100 Unix machine." I could tell in her eyes, though, that she was feeling the world shift, heavily, from one epoch to the next.

throwawayboise 5y ago
I didn't use Linux proper until 2000. I had used Minix in around 1988/89 for an operating systems class. Never struck me as odd to be running a unix on my 8088 PC with 1 floppy drive. At the time it just seemed like a more powerful DOS.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

I had a teacher I was talking to (he looked kinda young to me) and he said he remembered when he first used linux when it had come out. What was mind blowing to me was that it was in his lifetime right after I was born.

ASalazarMX 5y ago

I knew about Linux before trying it, so the free part was no surprise. My uncanny valley was being able to recompile the kernel with any options I wanted to; that felt both cool and unnatural, like "why aren't protecting their source code?".

rufus_foreman 5y ago
Building from source was the fun part when I first got into Linux. Trying to get the modules down to the smallest subset possible that would run on my machine just to see how fast I could get it to boot. Tricky part was it was a dual boot Windows installation on a single hard drive, I was always worried I would screw something up that I couldn't recover from since I needed the computer for school. Somehow I didn't mess up anything I couldn't recover from.
krylon 5y ago
Ah, that brings back memories. Compiling your own kernel was kind of a rite of passage back in the day. Now I cannot remember when I last did that. Must have been 14 years or so, when I was still using Gentoo.
- anthk 5y ago
  I did that a few years ago for a semi-bricked WM8850 netbook which I can't reflash with Uberoid, a custom Android for these ARM machines. So I set up a VFAT partition with the kernel, a boot image file, and maybe I'll add some Void Linux root filesystem on an ext3 partition tomorrow. It's worse because booting from an SD card is not very realiable, but it's better than nothing.