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Linux 20 Years: Anecdotes from 1998

74 points by wmat 15y ago

prayag 15y ago
To anyone who knows the Finns this seems exactly how a typical (and I am on thin ice here for grossly generalizing a country of 5 million people, but let me continue) Finn would talk. Self-deprecating, modest and humorous in a very dry manner.
- gaius 15y ago
  After that, he spent a long time just reading netnews. Sorry, I mean of course that he was debugging his terminal emulation code by reading netnews Brilliant :-)
losethos 15y ago
Downvote this.
watmough 15y ago
Yes, it was an amazing time. I started with the Yggdrasil distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X which ran (I think) pretty happily on a Dell Dimension 486DX2 with a fairly small drive, 300 MB or so. Even then, with getting X running being kinda tricky, Linux was a big step up from Windows 3.1 and all the contortions you had to do to free up base RAM whilst stuck in the crappy memory model.
- arethuza 15y ago
  I can remember installing Slackware from floppies in (I think) '94 - quite a few boxes of them! Getting X working was certainly entertaining - lots of manual editing of Xconfig. I do remember failing to get X running on one PC and it turned out it was because of the graphics card having only 512K or memory.
  - watmough 15y ago
    Ahhhh, glad I had the CDROM version. The biggest floppy software I installed more than once was the 23 disk Microsoft Access which came out around that time. I wonder how many floppies it would take for the current version? Of course, I'd just upgraded to my first CD player, the old Mitsumi one where the entire drive was the caddy, and sort of prolapsed heavily out of the machine. Yes, a glorious 1x speed.
- dcminter 15y ago
  I started with the root and boot disks - then moved onto the Soft Landing System (SLS) disk set. From that to Slackware on 100 odd disks. I remember getting a pal at Cambridge University (nice fat pipe to the hosting sites) to email the disk images as uuencoded files to me where I was working - in 64Mb slices requiring tedious extraction and reconstruction. My employers didn't really get the internet and even their email was on the X400 suite rather than SMTP. Awful given that they were a major international computer company. I still think it's a shame that Linux missed their first big chance. At that time Windows For Workgroups 3.11 was the de facto standard. Linux was a massive distance ahead in most respect but didn't have the applications. It kept that lead until NT 4.1 came out and it's only recently with the Ubuntu distributions and the general move to web applications that I've started to be hopeful that it can finally displace Windows. Which is a shame because now that the technical advantages are diminished (or maybe even surpassed) I no longer care.
  - dcminter 15y ago
    Oh and what I meant to say before I started rambling - I remember being super impressed that my paperback copy of "Portable Unix" was larger than the disk media (2 x 1.44Mb diskettes) that encompassed the Linux clone. In retrospect it's startling that this was impressive!
tomjen3 15y ago
For those of you who share my slow mental arithmetic, no 1998 isn't twenty years ago -- you are not that old. Yet.
- axiak 15y ago
  I think the point is that linux is 20 years old (1991), and these are anecdotes from an earlier time in linux history. The headline isn't "Anectodes from 20 years ago, 1998".
joblessjunkie 15y ago
"Who I am and why I am here," despite being the first heading in the article, is curiously unanswered. It may seem immodest or obvious, but bloggers, please put your name prominently on your blog posts, especially if the most common word is "I".
- kahawe 15y ago
  With a bit of clicking around on the website, this should answer itself quite easily: Lars Wirzenius http://liw.fi/cv/ http://liw.fi/cv/
  - aristidb 15y ago
    Actually, no clicking required: The name is in the sidebar. I did need a while to find it there, though.
kahawe 15y ago
> For example, if the Hurd had been finished a few years ago Any minute now... I mean, even DNF made it eventually!!
guns 15y ago
One of his well-known quotes is: "Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." That strategy turned out rather well, I'd say.
- DrHankPym 15y ago
  I really liked that quote, too, but what do you mean turned out rather well?
  - guns 15y ago
    Linus repeats this line WRT distributed systems during his famous talk about git: "I have a theory about backups; I don't do them. I put stuff up on one site and everybody else mirrors it." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8#t=17m4s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8#t=17m4s
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

74 points by wmat 15y ago

To anyone who knows the Finns this seems exactly how a typical (and I am on thin ice here for grossly generalizing a country of 5 million people, but let me continue) Finn would talk. Self-deprecating, modest and humorous in a very dry manner.

gaius 15y ago
After that, he spent a long time just reading netnews. Sorry, I mean of course that he was debugging his terminal emulation code by reading netnews Brilliant :-)

losethos 15y ago

Downvote this.

watmough 15y ago

Yes, it was an amazing time. I started with the Yggdrasil distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X which ran (I think) pretty happily on a Dell Dimension 486DX2 with a fairly small drive, 300 MB or so. Even then, with getting X running being kinda tricky, Linux was a big step up from Windows 3.1 and all the contortions you had to do to free up base RAM whilst stuck in the crappy memory model.

arethuza 15y ago
I can remember installing Slackware from floppies in (I think) '94 - quite a few boxes of them! Getting X working was certainly entertaining - lots of manual editing of Xconfig. I do remember failing to get X running on one PC and it turned out it was because of the graphics card having only 512K or memory.
- watmough 15y ago
  Ahhhh, glad I had the CDROM version. The biggest floppy software I installed more than once was the 23 disk Microsoft Access which came out around that time. I wonder how many floppies it would take for the current version? Of course, I'd just upgraded to my first CD player, the old Mitsumi one where the entire drive was the caddy, and sort of prolapsed heavily out of the machine. Yes, a glorious 1x speed.
dcminter 15y ago
I started with the root and boot disks - then moved onto the Soft Landing System (SLS) disk set. From that to Slackware on 100 odd disks. I remember getting a pal at Cambridge University (nice fat pipe to the hosting sites) to email the disk images as uuencoded files to me where I was working - in 64Mb slices requiring tedious extraction and reconstruction. My employers didn't really get the internet and even their email was on the X400 suite rather than SMTP. Awful given that they were a major international computer company. I still think it's a shame that Linux missed their first big chance. At that time Windows For Workgroups 3.11 was the de facto standard. Linux was a massive distance ahead in most respect but didn't have the applications. It kept that lead until NT 4.1 came out and it's only recently with the Ubuntu distributions and the general move to web applications that I've started to be hopeful that it can finally displace Windows. Which is a shame because now that the technical advantages are diminished (or maybe even surpassed) I no longer care.
- dcminter 15y ago
  Oh and what I meant to say before I started rambling - I remember being super impressed that my paperback copy of "Portable Unix" was larger than the disk media (2 x 1.44Mb diskettes) that encompassed the Linux clone. In retrospect it's startling that this was impressive!

tomjen3 15y ago

For those of you who share my slow mental arithmetic, no 1998 isn't twenty years ago -- you are not that old. Yet.

axiak 15y ago
I think the point is that linux is 20 years old (1991), and these are anecdotes from an earlier time in linux history. The headline isn't "Anectodes from 20 years ago, 1998".

joblessjunkie 15y ago

"Who I am and why I am here," despite being the first heading in the article, is curiously unanswered. It may seem immodest or obvious, but bloggers, please put your name prominently on your blog posts, especially if the most common word is "I".

kahawe 15y ago
With a bit of clicking around on the website, this should answer itself quite easily: Lars Wirzenius http://liw.fi/cv/ http://liw.fi/cv/
- aristidb 15y ago
  Actually, no clicking required: The name is in the sidebar. I did need a while to find it there, though.

kahawe 15y ago

> For example, if the Hurd had been finished a few years ago Any minute now... I mean, even DNF made it eventually!!

guns 15y ago

One of his well-known quotes is: "Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." That strategy turned out rather well, I'd say.

DrHankPym 15y ago
I really liked that quote, too, but what do you mean turned out rather well?
- guns 15y ago
  Linus repeats this line WRT distributed systems during his famous talk about git: "I have a theory about backups; I don't do them. I put stuff up on one site and everybody else mirrors it." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8#t=17m4s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8#t=17m4s

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]