18 ms·

The early days of Linux

1378 points by Paul-Craft 4y ago

darkhorse34 4y ago
[dead]
20after4 4y ago
Such a great article. Much respect to Lars. I had the great privilege of working with him at Wikimedia and he's genuinely one of the nicest and funniest people you could ever hope to meet.
vmlinuz 4y ago
This article is a masterpiece of deadpan Nordic understatement! Also a good read...
- deleted 4y ago
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- philistine 4y ago
  That joke about his preferred Linux installation method is chef's kiss.
bdcravens 4y ago
> The system was initially called Freax Maybe it's common knowledge, but first time I've heard that. I wonder how that would have impacted adoption if it had stuck?
- yubiox 4y ago
  Then instead of the linnux and lynux pronunciation confusion we'd have freaks and free-ax.
  - bdcravens 4y ago
    Perhaps it was meant to be pronounced like Free Ox, since an ox looks a bit like a gnu (wildebeest)
    - yencabulator 4y ago
      Quite unlikely: > The first releases of Linux used a license that forbade commercial use. Some of the early contributors suggested a change to a free-software license. In the fall of 1991, Richard Stallman visited Finland and I took Linus to a talk given by Stallman. This, the pressure from contributors, and my nagging eventually convinced Linus to choose the GNU GPL license instead, in early 1992.
  - gattilorenz 4y ago
    This audio is burned in my memory since I was configuring my SoundBlaster in Red Hat 5.2: https://youtu.be/c39QPDTDdXU https://youtu.be/c39QPDTDdXU
    - jrussino 4y ago
      This just made me realize that even though I pronounce Linux as "Lee-nux" (the same way he does), I always read his name as "Lie-nus" (like the Charlie brown character).
      - rightbyte 4y ago
        His name is pronounced "Lee-nus" in Finnish so I guess it makes sense.
- sneed_chucker 4y ago
  Hard to say. "Unix" is pronounced like "eunuchs" and yet saw pretty wide adoption. Definitely in a different time and under other circumstances than Linux though.
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    Yoo-nicks rather than yoo-nucks surely?
    - pcthrowaway 4y ago
      They're both pronounced "Yoo-nicks"
      - lproven 4y ago
        They really are not, you know.
    - Laaas 4y ago
      Unix: /ˈjuːnɪks/ Eunuch: /ˈjuː.nək/ Presumably the plural form retains the vowel, hence they are just a bit different.
    - housecarpenter 4y ago
      Some accents don't distinguish those two vowels in unstressed positions.
      - jamiek88 4y ago
        Like the Kiwi accent?! Didn't think of that! Thanks.
  - aap_ 4y ago
    There's an anecdote that they answered the phone in the UNIX room with "eunuchs room" in a high pitched voice.
- meekaaku 4y ago
  There is a quote somewhere that says Linus names his programs after himself. Freax for freak, and then later git too. Git means an unpleasant person.
  - kragen 4y ago
    people often use 'git' for people they think are unpleasant, but that is in order to insult them — 'git' means 'stupid person', not 'unpleasant person'
    - alexfoo 4y ago
      > 'git' means 'stupid person', not 'unpleasant person' Native English speaker (UK) and I've never heard 'git' used to mean 'stupid person'. I've only ever heard it used to mean 'unpleasant person', generally in the form of "complete git" or "utter git". (Of course, language use can be different in different countries.)
zabzonk 4y ago
i started using linux in the mid-90s, after using commercial unices for the previous 10 years. i was amazed at how well-engineered it all was. i think i was using slack - too long ago to remember. thanks linus.
- b112 4y ago
  The only guy I knew who used commercial unixes at home back then, lived in Seattle and loved to play games. Even got his girlfriend interested in them, which was unusual at the time. Come to think of it, I remember one day some government goons took him away, right around that big nuclear scare. And no one has heard from him ever since. Hmm.
  - zabzonk 4y ago
    and your point is ... what?
    - b112 4y ago
      Are you David?
davidw 4y ago
> After finishing the game, Linus started learning Intel assembly language. One day he showed me a program that did multitasking. One task or thread would write a stream of the letter "A" on the screen, the other "B"; the context switches were visually obvious when the stream of As became Bs. This was the first version of what would later become known as the Linux kernel. Reminds me of: "Gall’s Law states that all complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked. If you want to build a complex system that works, build a simpler system first, and then improve it over time." I owe so much to Linux and the whole free software movement, as a self-taught programmer. I set up my first Linux computer in late 1995 - it was a laptop with 4 mb of memory (which wasn't much even then) running Slackware that I'd downloaded over a modem over the course of several days. It was so cool to realize I could examine and modify the source code for... all of it! And interact with the people who had written all of it. I was hooked. I'm still using Linux as my primary development system these days.
- dopheide 4y ago
  I recall a friend installing Slackware about this timeframe (1995), where you could select which packages you wanted. We missed groff. As a result we didn't have man pages, had no idea how to fix it, and ended up doing a re-install. I miss those days.
- amadvance 4y ago
  Same here. Started with Slackware 3.0 in 1995, the first one distributed in CDROM. Still on Slackware.
jjice 4y ago
If you're interested in Linux history, check out Just For Fun by Linus Torvalds himself. It's written in 1999 if I recall, which is so much closer to Linux's inception than it is to today, so it's so interesting to hear thoughts and predictions about Linux at the time. Super cheap book. I think I got my copy for $4 on ebay.
- BanazirGalbasi 4y ago
  I found this book in my local library when I was in college, it was a really fun read. I had recently finished the OS course which used PintOS[1] and wanted to learn more about the development process. Unfortunately my C is still fairly rudimentary, and at this point it's going to be a bit longer before I attempt to follow Linus's path. 1: https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/cs140-spring20/pintos/pintos_1.html https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/cs140-spring20/pint...
- nik_0_0 4y ago
  +1 - Finished reading it this year, very fun read and much in the same vein as this article.
- ndesaulniers 4y ago
  Linus signed my copy!
  - jjice 4y ago
    Very jealous! If I every get the chance to go to a conference where he'll be, I'll absolutely bring by copy!
- oblio 4y ago
  For a more generic FOSS perspective, https://www.amazon.com/Rebel-Code-Linux-Source-Revolution/dp/0738206709 https://www.amazon.com/Rebel-Code-Linux-Source-Revolution/dp... is a very nice read. Cristi Vlăsceanu, if you're around, many thanks for the books. The OS one I gave to a Poli student that was very passionate about OSes.
eamonnsullivan 4y ago
Great read. The first distribution I used was TAMU (https://archiveos.org/tamu/ https://archiveos.org/tamu/) in 1992, when Linux wasn't yet at 1.0. I had to download dozens of floppy disk images. In those days, getting X to run involved real risk. Get some of the parameters wrong and you could destroy your monitor. My five kids (all in their 20s and 30s now) grew up running Linux. It's still the OS I choose when the option is available.
- MilStdJunkie 4y ago
  That was still a thing in 1998, when I got saddled with supporting the Slack boxes. Perspiration!
- incanus77 4y ago
  Same here for RH 5.1 in ‘98. I spent most of a summer messing around with trying to get the proper video modes working on my graphics card and learning the ins and outs of X configuration. Then came the sound card…
- sillystuff 4y ago
  > X to run involved real risk. Get some of the parameters wrong and you could destroy your monitor. The flexibility also allowed you to accomplish neat things. I was spoiled by high res 21" workstation monitors at school, so my laptop with a 640 x 480 screen was very limiting. But, telling X that the LCD was a multiscan monitor made every other scan line go to /dev/null-- the effect was a pseudo-resolution of 640x960 with scrunched up, but very readable fonts. Ran that setup for years.
kiss-o-matic 4y ago
[flagged]
krossitalk 4y ago
> the X11 system was ported to it, making 1992 the year of the Linux desktop. That's rich!
- zomg 4y ago
  I literally busted out laughing! We've been waiting all these years and... we missed it?!? xD
- Accujack 4y ago
  I remember running X the first time on Linux just after it was reported working because I happened to have the exact chipset that Peter MacDonald supported in my 386 at the time. We ran it off of a boot and root floppy - both 3.5", 1.44MB disks. We didn't do much with it at the time, but it was a big deal... we had only run X on workstations before that, and they were expensive and few and far between.
earthscienceman 4y ago
I absolutely love articles like this that humanize the creation of such a megalithic thing. It was just someone who was curious enough to tinker for a while on a project who was hanging out with friends. I love it. I think it would be hard to overstate the impact of Linux and free software. I do climate science research and its pretty obvious that every single paper that contains an important finding was built on FOSS. Latex, Linux, python, all the gnu tools, and so much more. Imagine being a researcher who needed to write any of that, or pay for all of that, in order to work. It's incredible. Thanks to everyone who codes, builds, or contributes to such projects. Also, it's laughable how little that is recognized in the science community.
- asciii 4y ago
  > It was just someone who was curious enough to tinker for a while on a project who was hanging out with friends. The modern world is underpinned by such discoveries--very accidental or curious types that go on to change the world and impact a lot of people. To quote a Steve Job's line: "I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well-being" [0] [0]: https://putsomethingback.stevejobsarchive.com/ https://putsomethingback.stevejobsarchive.com/
  - earthscienceman 4y ago
    Absolutely. But also, as a species, we're such a fan of these narratives that lionize people like Steve jobs. A brief article written by a friend about a project from their college years is much more humanizing than anything I've read about Steve Jobs. Sure, there's the "garage beginnings" part of the story but even that is very much lionized as "grind and hustle". I think the way the myth of Steve Jobs and his impact on the world is a great example to juxtapose against Linus\Linux in so many ways. Linux runs nearly everything and was given away for free and the broader public is totally unaware. Steve Jobs sells hardware and constantly played up the lion narrative as a push to make money and be important. Im more interested in the former than the lot. Inflammatory comment? Maybe. But I think we need to shift the values that we collectively encourage and this article is fantastic.
sdfghswe 4y ago
Wait, does this mean that Linux what programmed on MINIX?
- deleted 4y ago
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- ajross 4y ago
  Yes, it was bootstrapped from a minix install. The earliest filesystem was in fact minixfs, to share files with the development host environment.
mnw21cam 4y ago
I'm pretty sure Linus used Doom to stress-test the memory-management, not Quake. I have had a quote in my stash for ages: I've run DOOM more in the last few days than I have the last few months. I just love debugging ;-) -- Linus Torvalds
- rightbyte 4y ago
  ";-)" It looks so strange with the nose nowadays. But that was how people did it if I remember correctly.
  - badsectoracula 4y ago
    I always used the nose even when my friends used noseless emoticons as the latter look like squished faces to me :-P
    - mwcremer 4y ago
      Huh! I always read that as sticking out one's tongue.
      - eyko 4y ago
        It is!
      - kelnos 4y ago
        The tongue was 'P'. Either ;P or ;-P (or :P or :-P).
  - WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
    I still like to do these: :^) — with a nose that looks like, well, a nose, *<:^) — with a beanie hat, Ж:^) — with unkempt hair. Emojis bring some expression, but they take some away, too.
- usefulcat 4y ago
  This is correct; it was definitely doom in 93-94. I remember playing it then, and it was brand new at that time.
kyaghmour 4y ago
Some friends told me they ran into Andrew Tannenbaum at Embedded World a few years ago and asked him if he still believed that Minix was better than Linux. Apparently he said yes. DISCLAIMER: 2nd hand story.
- cwillu 4y ago
  If I routinely had strangers coming up to me picking arguments about something argument I made decades before (always the same thing), I'd pretty quickly come up with the minimum necessary reply to end the interaction as well.
- guenthert 4y ago
  Better for what? Tannenbaum is an educator and Minix an educational tool. It is arguably the better tool to teach operating systems.
- Stratoscope 4y ago
  Leaving aside which OS is "better", if you have an Intel processor you are very likely running Minix right now! https://www.google.com/search?q=What+Intel+firmware+contains+the+Minix+operating+system https://www.google.com/search?q=What+Intel+firmware+contains...
gumballindie 4y ago
Now _this_ is the kind of content that I crave for.
divbzero 4y ago
> During this time, late spring of 1991, I wrote an implementation of the C sprintf() function for [Linus Torvalds], as he hadn't yet learned how to write functions with variable argument lists. I wanted to spare him the pain of having a different function for every type of value to write out. That’s such a cool detail. Everyone starts somewhere. (Shuffling off to commit change to Git and deploy to Linux…)
Scubabear68 4y ago
This is a great read of a humble start of history. The A..B concurrency printing, helping Linus out implementing Sprintf, learning assembly. Building it all towards a coherent system. What was truly profound is how Linux and other open source systems and libraries completely cracked open systems software for the masses. Back in the early 90s, everything around Unix, operating systems, compilers, tools, everything was crazy expensive to buy. And all of a sudden here came this thundering herd of code that was all completely free. Of course Gnu stuff had been around for awhile, but Linux is what propelled it into warp speed adoption. In thr 90s I was privileged to work at Bear Stearns and had a Sparc Station on my desk and regular interactions with SunOS, Solaris, and HPUX for the guys downstairs. Outside of University and business, it was hard for individuals to break into it. By the late 90s any old anybody could get a CD ROM with Red Hat or whatever.
- pacaro 4y ago
  Absolutely. I remember the articles in the trade press in the mid 90s asking "Is UN*X dead?" (Hindsight of course tells us that Betteridge's law applied) But I was working for a small ISV making a windows based GIS and our customers were putting windows boxen on every desk in the office, and then ditching either intergraph based solutions or complex systems with Tektronix terminals. Our per seat license was a rounding error in their previous costs, and you could drag a selected rectangle from our map window and drop it into a word document. I occasionally helped with sales demos and you could see when the decision was made in the faces of the senior people when they saw this.
- gspencley 4y ago
  > By the late 90s any old anybody could get a CD ROM with Red Hat or whatever. That's exactly how I got into Linux. I bought a book about RedHat 5.2 with a CD ROM install disc in the sleeve :) Have been using Linux on all of my personal devices (and every work device that I'm allowed to) ever since. Oddly enough, I also had a Sparc Station 5 on my desk at one time. I remember the filesystem seemed very slow but it was cool as hell to be able to use "real Unix." I remember it even came with Internet Explorer of all things!
- 64bittechie 4y ago
mindcrime 4y ago
Aaah, yeah, the "good old days". I got started with Linux around 1995 or so. I don't actually remember which distribution I used first, as I was experimenting a lot back then. I remember using Turbo Linux, Yggdrasil, and Slackware at times. Sometime in 95 or 96 I was a student at UNC Wilmington and I remember a bunch of us were out in the courtyard by the C.S. building when somebody came up talking about this new company called "Red Hat" that was, get this, selling Linux! That led to some rather, erm, passionate, discussion that day. I actually wound up gravitating to Red Hat linux myself in the end, and to this day I still use RH oriented distros (mostly Fedora) for most things. And I even wound up working for Red Hat for a spell. So yeah, Linux and his "toy" kernel definitely had a huge impact on my life over the years. And so did Bob Young and his company that had the audacity to charge money for free software. :-)
- mrits 4y ago
  I installed slackware as a 12 year old in the early 90s. I only have 1 PC in the house (other computer was amiga 500 with no internet). My ISP only supported PPP connection which didn't work very well at the time on Linux. Since the PC was my only source to online help I literally had to reinstall windows and then slackware every time I made an attempt at getting it working. It took probably 15-20 rounds over a couple of months but when I got it felt like the biggest accomplishment of my life.
  - microtonal 4y ago
    More or less the same (12 years in 1994), however we didn't have internet until some years later. I learned pretty much everything from a Dutch Linux book (which was on the market very early) and all the HOWTOs and guides from the Linux Documentation project.
- sumtechguy 4y ago
  I sort of remember the first one I had. It came on a couple of 3.5 floppies. I promptly ignored it for a year or so then came back and it was 20+ of them now for slackware with hundreds of utilities I had no idea what they did. That was a ton of fun digging thru.
ssklash 4y ago
> "Linux is running on every continent, on every ocean, on billions of devices, in orbit, and on Mars." What a fantastically cool sentence!
kyaghmour 4y ago
I can't find the article anymore (and I've looked for it several times in the past) but someone was making the point that open source was essentially an economic phenomenon. Insofar as distribution costs went to zero with the advent of mass-access to the internet then it was inevitable that people would start sharing software. Obviously this takes nothing away from all those early contributors, but it is food for thought. Mind you while Linux was taking off the BSDs were apparently busy in lawsuits. So, while the zeroing of distribution costs should've benefited them, it seems Linux was at the right place at the right time, minus the baggage.
- toyg 4y ago
  The problem with BSDs was not much the lawsuits but the fact that they didn't figure out a governance model that could scale. Linux had open mailing lists and low barriers to entry, BSDs had "core" cliques. Linux begat git, a distributed VCS, when BSDs were happy with the likes of CVS, where control is rigidly centralized. Etc etc.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - arp242 4y ago
    git didn't appear until much much later; and maintainers who can pull in code is not so different than a "core clique" with a commit bit: it's till a relatively small group of people who decide what does and doesn't get merged – it's more of a workflow thing than anything else. Of all the possible factors this seems like the least convincing one.
- retrac 4y ago
  The "Net" in NetBSD (the first open source BSD community to coalesce after the lawsuits settled) refers to that, it's the network operating system. And not really in the sense of an OS for networks (though it certainly is that) but one from and of the network.
- cesarb 4y ago
  > Mind you while Linux was taking off the BSDs were apparently busy in lawsuits. So, while the zeroing of distribution costs should've benefited them, it seems Linux was at the right place at the right time, minus the baggage. There were other reasons. Reusing an older comment of mine (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32372063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32372063): My favorite theory for why Linux got a head start is in this (long) comment I found some time ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21420338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21420338 Some excerpts: "With Linux, I just booted from a Linux boot floppy with my Linux install CD in the CD-ROM drive, and ran the installation. With BSD...it could not find the drive because I had an IDE CD-ROM and it only supported SCSI." "It insisted on being given a disk upon which it could completely repartition. [...] Linux, on the other hand, was happy to come second after my existing DOS/Windows." "By the time the BSD people realized they really should be supporting IDE CD-ROM and get along with prior DOS/Windows on the same disk, Linux was way ahead."
taylorportman 4y ago
Not to be a GNU/Linux instigator but I remember when I first read the GPL how strange it was to have a legal document to give something away it seemed like a impish prank - will someone take it and insist you stop giving it away, or sue you when their production line breaks down.. And then the flamewars began, the pronunciation, the toolchain, freetards, 'open sores', etc. but it was the GPL making it all possible.
paulddraper 4y ago
> In 1991, Linus wrote that Linux "won't be big and professional like gnu". In 2023. Linux is running on every continent, on every ocean, on billions of devices, in orbit, and on Mars. Amazing
9front 4y ago
The Linux kernel took off after Linus receive the MINIX book, a.k.a Operating System Design and Implementation by Tanenbaum, which include the source code of MINIX. Until the arrival of the book Linus was playing "Prince Of Persia" on his new 386AT desktop.
- snvzz 4y ago
  If only if Linus actually listened to Tanenbaum. We could have a nice microkernel, multiserver design, instead of what we have. And we wouldn't have to deprecate Linux (soon now) to replace it with something better architected.
  - fulafel 4y ago
    Are you still using Linux? Most of us moved to Hurd for exactly this reason already.
    - snvzz 4y ago
      I mostly use Linux, yes. As for HURD, I consider it a dead end, as it seems to have no direction and appears to have failed to move away from Mach.
  - zajio1am 4y ago
    There were several microkernel-based research/hobby/free kernels in early 1990s, like L4, VSTa, or even HURD. Perhaps the reason why Linux succeeded as a general purpose OS (and not one of these) is because of its conservative design.
    - snvzz 4y ago
      Let's suppose it ended up like that. It would mean one of the BSDs would have become popular instead. And we'd be better for it.
vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago
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davidthewatson 4y ago
I found this article resplendent because Linux has given back to me what I put into it year after year since it launched the year I graduated college. What I wonder is this: is there a story happening now that has similar good will for the future of AI without having commercial or social computing as its basis? The reason I love Linux is that Linus started and finished before commercial and social concerns became the raison d'etre in software.
- jimbokun 4y ago
  Commercial concerns were also the raison d'être in software before and during the time Linus was creating Linux, too.
braindead_in 4y ago
I wonder if some day someone will write a similar story about early days of LLMs.
- linhns 4y ago
  "Engineering prompts in a maddening fashion so that it works the way I want it to be.". This sentence should be in that article
Votearome 4y ago
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Votearome 4y ago
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snvsn 4y ago
Linus describes this and more in his book - Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. Great read
- Rant423 4y ago
  Agree. If you liked this article, pick up the book.
Votearome 4y ago
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mhh__ 4y ago
This git tutorial from 2005ish is interesting https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/927a503cd07718ea0f700052043f383253904a56/Documentation/core-tutorial.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/927a503cd07718ea0f...
- coldpie 4y ago
  Looks like this eventually became gitcore-tutorial, which still ships with Git today.
jcadam 4y ago
I remember downloading Slackware floppy images from a local BBS the first time I wanted to try Linux. Good times.
jononomo 4y ago
The fact that Linus created both Linux and Git will never cease to impress me. I might even suggest that Linus is a "ten x programmer".
- fifticon 4y ago
  I wonder the number would be somewhat larger than 10.. Still, my hands can reach the keys on a keyboard, so I won't give up..
rufus_foreman 4y ago
How source control used to be done: >> the students shared a source tree over NFS and shouted "I'm editing this file" when they were changing something
capableweb 4y ago
This article is a goldmine of old, classic stuff and lots of information I have not yet read. Great read and nice of the author to share the experience, I hope people with these kind of experiences continue to share their subjective views on history. Unrelated but fun highlight from the mentioned newsletter: > Linux News #3 > Issue #3, October 18 through 26, 1992 > ** Highlights in this issue > - ed is here, editor wars are over
LastTrain 4y ago
Lovely article. My first install was Slackare 2.3, kernel version 1.2.13 on a 386sx. Thirteen floppies. I don't even remember why I installed it or where I'd heard of it. I don't think I even knew what Unix was, but I vividly remember the "darkstar $" prompt when it was all done and then my social life suffered for a few months...
jll29 4y ago
Thanks to Lars Wirzenius for sharing his first Linux (and Linus) memories. BTW, nowadays Lars teaches Rust using his own consultancy. I well remember (the younger me, a school kid) having to install 50 3.5" floppy disks FTP'd from the University of Karlsruhe's servers, only to discover that some where faulty & having to do it all over again. And then the reward of having the X11 logo and xeyes on your own desktop - 1992 was a fantastic year!
GoofballJones 4y ago
I began tinkering with Linux about 6 months after it's inception. I think....think...it was what became Slackware in what I gathered up the things to make it run on my Micron Pentium. This was in the day I was trying everything on that machine. I had DOS running on it at one point, then OS/2 Warp, then Windows 3.1, then Linux, then back to OS/2 etc etc. It was at a time where everything was up in the air, before Windows 95 took a major foothold.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  This was in the day I was trying everything on that machine. I had DOS running on it at one point, then OS/2 Warp, then Windows 3.1, then Linux, then back to OS/2 etc etc. Heh. I remember trying one time to get as many different OS's multi-booting on one physical box as I could. I think I had about 5 at one point, something like Windows 95, OS/2, Red Hat 6.2, FreeBSD (or maybe OpenBSD), Caldera Linux, and maybe something else. And then I tried to add one more (I think it was Solaris x86) and totally hosed everything and had to start over. Definitely the "good ole days". :-)
geoelkh 4y ago
awesome post!
linuxhansl 4y ago
Hah. Used SLS (and then Slackware) back then. I think the first version of the kernel I used was 0.98pl13. I worked at DEC back then and did not have Internet at home, so I would schedule jobs at night to download the 1.3" floppy images and then copy them to actual floppies to bring home. Can't believe that is 30 years ago now.
- icedchai 4y ago
  I also started with SLS, but got in a little later (late 92, maybe 93?) I think 0.99pl10 was where I started. I remember the 12 or 15 floppy images.
- alexfoo 4y ago
  For me the first one that sticks in my head is the MCC distrib on ~10 floppies, with (I think) a bunch more for X. Definitely used 0.9[89] before that (late '93) but no solid memory of details. Kernel version 1.0.8 is burned into my brain though.
- martyvis 4y ago
  Yep I did the same (I worked at BHP the Aussie industrial multinational, and funnily ended up at DEC in '97 and still work there via HPE). Initially I was doing the regular downloads to a SGI workstation and writing the floppy images out on I think on a DOS PC. Eventually I was able to repurpose an unused 386 at work to become my Linux server at work.
ttttyyyyyyyy 4y ago
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bertmuthalaly 4y ago
I love the crossover with the Prince of Persia, which was also an early computer labor of love.
bitwize 4y ago
As an earlyish (1995) Linux adopter I'd heard some of these tales, like the fact that it started as a simple task scheduler that wrote a's and b's to the screen. But it's cool to hear it from someone who was actually there to witness those early events as they unfolded.
MarkusWandel 4y ago
One big takeaway is how close the real Unix (in the form of 386BSD) came to being where Linux is today. If it had been available freely one year earlier, Linux wouldn't have gained momentum. Would it be better to have one true free Unix-like OS now, rather than two? Did the free-for-all development in Linux depend on it having no "pure" ancestry? Nobody knows.
- geocar 4y ago
  > If it had been available freely one year earlier, Linux wouldn't have gained momentum. I doubt that. Real Unix was a pretty horrible experience for a lot of hobbyists starting right from the disklabel, and many of those smug bastards where pretty horrible people to hobbyists. The fact Linux worked on crap hardware meant people who could only afford crap hardware could learn it, and get good at it. Linux overtook Real Unix real fast in-terms of hardware support -- so fast I don't think *BSD ever stood a chance. Stability and quality is a double-edged sword: You think you gotta keep the crap out or it gets crap, but the reality is that crap is what makes it fun, and fun is why people used Linux and not Real Unix. If you want to make something great, you've got to do is focus on things that matter, and remember: fun matters more than scsi. > Would it be better to have one true free Unix-like OS now, rather than two? Did the free-for-all development in Linux depend on it having no "pure" ancestry? Nobody knows. Some people say "pure" and others say "inbred". I say this thing you're thinking about is a distraction: anything that prevents people from trying things out is slowing progress, there just ain't two ways around it. Worse is not better: It just means you don't know what's important. Better is better.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Also, alternatives coming from Linux vs "the corporate Unix" often used far less memory and CPU and ran much faster. XTerm vs Rxvt Fvwm vs CDE Netscape/Mozilla vs Dillo Irix' MWM vs JWM
- kikoreis 4y ago
  Well, the reason Linus could confidently choose to license the kernel as GPLv2 is exactly because it inherited no incompatibly-licensed code. USL v. BSDi (also 1992 — what a year!) is evidence of how non-trivial this actually is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....
noobcoder 4y ago
It's hella amazing to see how Linux has been used in so many different industries and applications, from chip design to web servers to personal computers and moree. It's a testament to the flexibility and power of the open-source model, and the ingenuity of the community that has built and maintained it over the years
newswasboring 4y ago
This has to be the funniest tech article I have ever read. I was literally laughing out loud. I don't even remember the last time I had such an emotional response to a tech article. Probably it was something by whytheluckystiff back in my teenage.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  There is almost a (probably misleading) glimmer of “i could have done that”, because the story is so human, he really did have to learn assembly by printing A and Bs, he didn’t have a grand design and just smash out an OS in vim and upload it! This is real agile programming.
- commandersaki 4y ago
  Lars has written about his interactions with Linus before in this article: https://liw.fi/linux20/ https://liw.fi/linux20/ I fondly remember these lines: That summer, I re-connected with my fellow students from the university, including Linus. One of the students a few years older than Linus and me, Patrik, had a sauna in the building he lived, and he booked it once a week for the group of us. You perverts who think the word sauna is a synonym for brothel can stop imagining orgies: in Finland, saunas are for bathing, medication, even meditation, not sex. There’s a semi-famous picture of Linus, looking naked, drinking beer. The picture was taken at Patrik’s, by a fellow student, Stina, and Linus is wearing trousers, but it was a hot summer day, so he didn’t have his shirt on. No orgies. Really.
unforgivenpasta 4y ago
> We decided to release version 1.0 and arranged a release event. The Finnish computer press was invited, and a TV station even sent a crew. Was this ever aired? Was it recorded? If so, is there a public archive of it somewhere?
- bullion9872 4y ago
  Found this after quick search https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaDpjlFpbfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaDpjlFpbfo
- v7n 4y ago
  Perhaps you missed the words "release event" being a hyperlink to this rather short clip on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaDpjlFpbfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaDpjlFpbfo Edit: Decided to add a link to a Finnish-language 27 minute documentary of Linus (21.1.1998) so this isn't just a duplicate comment. https://areena.yle.fi/1-50115178 https://areena.yle.fi/1-50115178
fatnoah 4y ago
Wow, this brings me back to the crazy days of college in the fall of 1994. My roommates and I ran a mish-mosh of OSs, including Windows (3.11), OS/2, and Linux (Slackware distro). The last was certainly the biggest challenge, but once we had remote xterms to campus servers, there was no need to slog to a computer lab. I also remember the era of free access to things. I had an account on some Stanford systems "just in case I wanted to run some stuff". It was a totally different time.
- GoofballJones 4y ago
  Yes, exactly. Around 1993-94 I was running through so many different OS's on my Micron Pentium. DOS, then OS/2 Warp, then Linux, then Windows 3.1, then back to OS/2, then to Linux. Drove my wife crazy.
teleforce 4y ago
It's strange that Lars did not mention about Yggdrasil Linux, it's probably the earliest Linux distro even before Slackware existed [1][2]. According to the article, 1992 is the year of Linux desktop by the introduction of X11 system but every year since then is allegedly the year of Linux on the desktop. Anyway this article has taken me back down memory lane, thanks Lars. 1) The Very 1st Linux OS Ever Made? https://www.linux.org/threads/the-very-1st-linux-os-ever-made.28596/ https://www.linux.org/threads/the-very-1st-linux-os-ever-mad... 2) Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X
- bashtoni 4y ago
  MCC interim was the first Linux distribution. Its creator had to implement what we would consider pretty fundamental tools, including fdisk. Yggdrasil was released half a year or so later, and included most of these tools. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCC_Interim_Linux https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCC_Interim_Linux
  - teleforce 4y ago
    Yes, I stand corrected. In fact my friend who studied in UMIST (now part of University of Manchester) introduced me to Linux. The fact that Manchester Computing Centre (MCC) is based inside UoM probably make it accessible to him because at the time Linux was installed from floppies.
    - alexfoo 4y ago
      I miss my shell account on jumper.mcc.ac.uk
gabereiser 4y ago
This is great. A few years later I would stumble upon this new operating system. I was hooked. I spent all my time tinkering with it, building with it, so much so that I ignored the outside world around me. Case in point, me, ignoring the world around me [1]. I was maybe 13 at the time. 1996 I think. Man, the wonder of the unknown and the potential of the future… :D [1]: https://pasteboard.co/yOQrjCR8OsZh.jpg https://pasteboard.co/yOQrjCR8OsZh.jpg
kebman 4y ago
Very Finnish humour: "I recommend this method of installing Linux: napping, while Linus does the hard work." Kippis, folks!
- commandersaki 4y ago
  I wonder if Linus can install Arch without using the Arch Wiki.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - kebman 4y ago
    That's funny! I'll still go ahead and attempt a somewhat serious answer. xD Arguably it's an addition to his original code that possibly modularizes his kernel in ways that he isn't familiar with, and that also might add completely new and unknown features to it. Thus it would probably behove him to read the Wiki either way. On the other hand, perhaps he's so 1337 that all he needs to do is to read the source code. My most major caveat here is that I don't myself know if there are any actual differences between his original kernel, and the code committed to the Arch Project. I thus think others are more qualified to say something intelligent about that, but these are my assumptions anyway. Hope you're having a great weekend! Skål!
meekaaku 4y ago
I wonder how much the overconfidence played in making it a success.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
js2 4y ago
Circa 1996 I was getting my CS degree. At the same time, I got a job at a small local company running an ISP on the side. A dozen Hayes modems hooked up to a Livingston Portmaster. T1 uplink. And two PCs (named "hops" and "barley") running Slackware. That was my first experience with Linux. It was a barbaric OS compared to the Unix workstations we had in the CS department running HP/UX and SunOS. But it had promise... I think my first open source contribution was while working there (I added the "-e" switch to chpasswd) and it's still part of Linux today. Let's see... found it: https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow/blob/master/NEWS#L1780 https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow/blob/master/NEWS#L178...
- icedchai 4y ago
  SunOS was also pretty bare bones, if I remember correctly. CS departments had to install a ton of 3rd party software to give you a usable system.
  - js2 4y ago
    Yes, absolutely. But it was solid Unix OS with excellent documentation. I also worked for the CS department. We installed software centrally to an NFS server which was then automounted. We used something called "depot" from CMU to setup a software depot: https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=821346 https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=82134... https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/.cs.cmu.edu/help/content/unix_linux/software_collections/local_depot.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/.cs.cmu.edu/help/content/unix_lin... The biggest PITA about this scheme at the time was that you wanted "make install" to put software in one location (/depot/...), but you wanted that software to have paths compiled in as if it were in a different location (/usr/local/...). For the most part, the Makefiles that came with open source software then just weren't designed that way. You could set PREFIX but it was used for both the compiled-in paths as well as where "make install" put things. I recall spending a lot of time wrestling things into the depot scheme. Seems absurdly over-engineered looking at it now. Later in my career, I spent a lot of time building RPMs which was similarly painful but got easier over time. Software packaging... fun times.
nickdothutton 4y ago
I first installed Linux in secret on a spare partition of a Windows 386 at University. It was 1994, and for a while it was like having my own workstation, normally the Suns and VAXstations were reserved for the Post Docs and researchers. Because PCs were in abundance and both Sun and VMS systems restricted and tightly controlled, many of us setup home on that PC. It was anarchy.
jgilias 4y ago
I miss the days when Slack didn’t mean a chat app.
- worik 4y ago
  Warmed over IRC Strange days
- phone8675309 4y ago
  A Subgenius needs slack
bla3 4y ago
Tangential, but it's kind of pleasing that Lars WirzeNius is writing an article for lwn.net.
- 20after4 4y ago
  Indeed when I first saw the link I misinterpreted it as a link to Lars’ personal blog.
freedomben 4y ago
What a great sense of humor this author has! I literally lol'ed at some of these jokes. It's hard to make humor shine through writing, so I'm double impressed. Some of the best, but don't deprive yourself of the whole article (because it's a gem): > More importantly for the future success of Linux was that the X11 system was ported to it, making 1992 the year of the Linux desktop. > Thus, mine was the first PC where Linux was ever installed. While this was happening, I was taking a nap, and I recommend this method of installing Linux: napping, while Linus does the hard work. > A couple of years later, he spent days playing Quake, ostensibly to stress-test kernel memory management, although that was with a newer PC. Much fun was had in that room, and there were no pranks whatsoever. None at all. > Alas, early Linux networking code was occasionally a little rough, having been written from scratch. At one point, Linux would send some broken packets that took down all of the Sun machines on the network. As it was difficult to get the Sun kernel fixed, Linux was banned from the university network until its bug was fixed. Not having Usenet access from one's desk is a great motivator. > In the spring of 1994 we felt that Linux was done. Finished. Nothing more to add. One could use Linux to compile itself, to read Usenet, and run many copies of the xeyes program at once. We decided to release version 1.0 and arranged a release event. > I insisted that a version-control system be used. I had witnessed students in earlier courses do the shouting kind of version control: the students shared a source tree over NFS and shouted "I'm editing this file" when they were changing something. This did not seem like an effective method to me, so I insisted on CVS, > In 1997 Linus graduated and moved to the US to take a job at Transmeta. I took a job at a different university in the Helsinki area. In the following years, many things happened. It turned out that there were still a few missing features from Linux, so people worked on those. > The term "open source" was coined and IBM invested a ton of money in Linux development. Netscape published a version of its web browser as open source. Skipping a few details and many years, open source basically took over the world. LWN was started and covered much of this history on a week-by-week basis.
- chucknthem 4y ago
  The 2nd part of the CVS section was funny too "[...] This experience is why Linus dislikes CVS and for years refused to use any version control beyond uploading tar balls to FTP sites." It's deadpan humor in written form.
7373737373 4y ago
Interesting that they were aware of Plan9 from the beginning!
kevsamuel 4y ago
LWN is consistently good, I really should subscribe.
raarts 4y ago
I first downloaded Slackware in June '93. I needed 13 diskettes. Installed it on my Compaq 386/SX 4Mb laptop, and spent the rest of the year learning myself Linux. In November '93 I founded one of the first internet providers in The Netherlands, and I'm pretty certain my family was the first Dutch family that had always-on public internet from the home. Also I might have been one of the first companies in the NL to run Linux in a business-critical environment. Linux always kept me from running Windows on my desktop. Although I switched to the Mac in 2005 after big problems get multimedia And graphics to work reliably. Without Linux my life would have been completely different. It allowed me to create a new future for myself. So I'm hugely grateful for its existence.
hamilyon2 4y ago
I really hope that in a sense today is still early days of Linux. What a beautiful software which taught me such a lot of things.
emmelaich 4y ago
I was doing CS at a similar time. Used Ultrix and HP-UX at work. Until Linux and Minix it was very hard to get a Unix on a PC. Someone had SystemV running, not sure how. Once Linux appeared, other home Unixes started evaporating, except for *BSDs. I was at the very first Sydney Linux Users Group meeting (SLUG). Have pics! The only pics of that event. Have tried to get permission from others so I can share, but no response :-(. Might share them anyway. Later in the 90s we had Linus over for a conference. Had a day out the harbour, good times. Got an excellent shot of Linus's head framed by the Opera House. Then found I had no film in the camera! Linux came back to Australia more than a few times of course. On one of these he was infamously bitten* by a Fairy Penguin. * Not sure if you could describe such a tiny animal as having a bite!
- martyvis 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure you should share them (statue of limitations and all that ;-) ). I probably went to my first SLUG meeting maybe '94 or '95. (I bought my 1st PC specially for dual booting DOS and Linux with Slackware early '93)
markus_zhang 4y ago
Interesting stories, thanks for sharing. I'm wondering, is there any tutorial to guide one from a bootloader to a very early version of Linux (but already have the barebone programs)? I guess any serious OS Dev course will do that, but would be interesting to find one specifically focused on Linux.
- 20after4 4y ago
  Get an old iso of Slackware and do it from scratch. For the authentic experience do it without internet access and using only the included install instructions. I once attempted this as an exercise on a very old thinkpad having only DOS+mscdex on the hard drive and a Slackware 2.1 CD-ROM. Bootstrapping that system is a feat that I’m still proud of. Though it was sort of a pointless exercise for my own gratification.
  - jillesvangurp 4y ago
    That's how I did it in 1995. I printed a few howto's, downloaded 27 or so Slackware floppy disk images, copied those onto actual disks, and biked home and booted from the first disk to start the installation process. At some point I had an issue with a corrupted disk so I had to bike back to the university to create a replacement. Following the howto, I got a booting system on my PC (dual booting with MS Dos/windows 3.x). And then using the bundled documentation, I was able to get X up and running, figured out how to rebuild the kernel with the sound drivers I needed, etc. Fun times.
thewanderer1983 4y ago
I started using Linux in my early teen years. I'm now 39. When I started I had dial up internet and it took me a week to get my Win Modem to work. I would boot into Win95 join a IRC server like dalnet, jump on #Linuxhelp and ask for suggestions. Reboot the system into Linux and try it out. Then repeat. I think the early community deserves a big thanks, especially those on IRC.
nortonham 4y ago
more than anything else this is just a really well written article
sedatk 4y ago
> At one point, Linux would send some broken packets that took down all of the Sun machines on the network. As it was difficult to get the Sun kernel fixed, Linux was banned from the university network until its bug was fixed. Well well well, who's running on the university network now?
brundolf 4y ago
> I had witnessed students in earlier courses do the shouting kind of version control: the students shared a source tree over NFS and shouted "I'm editing this file" when they were changing something We did exactly this for a project my freshman year of college, in 2011, except it was Dropbox instead of NFS :)
starbase 4y ago
I felt SOO late to the game when I got into Linux in the 90s. And now I'm that old motherfucker with a quarter century under my belt. Holy hell, time flies.
alexnastase 4y ago
Posts like these are the reason why I'm checking HN. It's really nice to read about Linux's humble beginnings especially given how wide-spread it has become today.
pjmlp 4y ago
> The term "open source" was coined and IBM invested a ton of money in Linux development. What goes around comes around, and now Red-Hat belongs to IBM.
martyvis 4y ago
To those that wondered what it was like to get Linux running in those early days, here is a post I made in April 1993 (30 years ago this month!) to the "comp.os.linux" Usenet group trying to dual boot Linux and DOD on my new 486 PC with I think no more than a 80MB harddrive. (BTW a2,a3,a3 refer to the first 3 floppy disks you need after the boot and I think root disk to start installing) Help installing Linux. 5/4/93 Hi, I,ve tried to install the SLS base system 99p6. I partitioned my 210 Maxtor drive to half DOS and then added a 15M /dev/hda2 (type 81 Linux,Minix) and 10M /dev/hda3 (type 83 Linux swap). After writing to the partition table and rebooting, I did a mkfs /dev/hda2 15504; mkswap /dev/hda3 4096; swapon /dev/hda3. After then running doinstall things seemed OK until it tried to start installing a2,a3 and a4. The system only looked at the disks for about a millisecond and then prompted me to insert the next one ( I was thinking, Boy! this installation is quick). Finally I got the prompt for formatted disk to make a boot disk. Thinking, I had finished, I attempted to boot this disk to no avail. Of course during doinstall I got messages such as "mv: command not found", "rm: command not found" and so forth. I am guessing that my /dev/hda2 is not mounting and hence the file system is not being transferred. I have been trying to dissassemble "doinstall" as most errors seem to be redirected to /dev/null. One "error" I noted on booting is "WD8013 not found at 280 ". Can't the driver find my disk controller? I have a TMC 486/33 motherboard with a VESA IDE controller. Linux seems to be able access the disk because the partitioning worked and mkfs -c works the disk out. Please help me out , I would love to get Linux up and running.
- pastage 4y ago
  I went full Linux directly! My problems where more along the lines of having enough space to recompile the kernel and work on my own projects.
- x7ci 4y ago
  Interesting. It's actually not very different from posts you'll see today on, for example, the newbie section of Arch Linux forums.
NotCamelCase 4y ago
To me, one of the most remarkable aspects of this story and reading others' comments is how relatively quickly people seem to have picked up Linux despite the lack of modern high-speed internet and one-click away forums and networks we all enjoy today. I guess that's an inevitable outcome if the market is ripe for some change no matter the opposing forces, like missing features, strong alternatives or no commercial support, etc.
- aa-jv 4y ago
  One of my earliest great Linux experiences was when I set up my 486 to download all of the floppy images (or maybe it was the Yggdrasil .iso), then went to Op Amp Bookstore in Los Angeles for lunch, finding myself an Yggdrasil distro, returning home, cancelling the download and getting on with it .. That was really a watershed for me: the whole thing on a single CD .. wow! And bootable, also!
johndoe0815 4y ago
If you want to take a closer look at the early days of the Linux kernel, I can recommend "A Heavily Commemted Linux Kernel Source Code", a listing of Linux kernel 0.12 with comments in the style of John Lions‘ commentary on 6th edition Unix (available in Chinese and English): http://www.oldlinux.org/ http://www.oldlinux.org/
gforce_de 4y ago
"That year (1995) was also when Linux was first ported to a new architecture by Linus. He'd been given a DEC Alpha machine." This is not fully correct: The first port ever was on Motorola M68k in 1993 for the Amiga platform. https://www.tech-insider.org/linux/research/1993/0915.html https://www.tech-insider.org/linux/research/1993/0915.html
- lonelygirl15a 4y ago
  I think the Alpha port stands out in memory because that was the cause for overcoming 32-bitness.
agentultra 4y ago
What a great article! I remember installing Linux on my friend’s PC. I think it was either 1997 or 1998 and he’d bought a retail copy of Mandrake. We took it back to his place and got it installed and running on his 200mhz Intel PC. I installed it on my machine too. What a game changer it turned out to be.
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sobkas 4y ago
And then X11 was ported to it and everything went downhill. I can't imagine worse graphics subsystem to use.
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sammyteee 4y ago
a horrible sense of déjà vu
- bobowzki 4y ago
  It's like déjà vu all over again.

1378 points by Paul-Craft 4y ago

[dead]

Such a great article. Much respect to Lars. I had the great privilege of working with him at Wikimedia and he's genuinely one of the nicest and funniest people you could ever hope to meet.

vmlinuz 4y ago

This article is a masterpiece of deadpan Nordic understatement! Also a good read...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
philistine 4y ago
That joke about his preferred Linux installation method is chef's kiss.

bdcravens 4y ago

> The system was initially called Freax Maybe it's common knowledge, but first time I've heard that. I wonder how that would have impacted adoption if it had stuck?

yubiox 4y ago
Then instead of the linnux and lynux pronunciation confusion we'd have freaks and free-ax.
- bdcravens 4y ago
  Perhaps it was meant to be pronounced like Free Ox, since an ox looks a bit like a gnu (wildebeest)
  - yencabulator 4y ago
    Quite unlikely: > The first releases of Linux used a license that forbade commercial use. Some of the early contributors suggested a change to a free-software license. In the fall of 1991, Richard Stallman visited Finland and I took Linus to a talk given by Stallman. This, the pressure from contributors, and my nagging eventually convinced Linus to choose the GNU GPL license instead, in early 1992.
- gattilorenz 4y ago
  This audio is burned in my memory since I was configuring my SoundBlaster in Red Hat 5.2: https://youtu.be/c39QPDTDdXU https://youtu.be/c39QPDTDdXU
  - jrussino 4y ago
    This just made me realize that even though I pronounce Linux as "Lee-nux" (the same way he does), I always read his name as "Lie-nus" (like the Charlie brown character).
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      His name is pronounced "Lee-nus" in Finnish so I guess it makes sense.
sneed_chucker 4y ago
Hard to say. "Unix" is pronounced like "eunuchs" and yet saw pretty wide adoption. Definitely in a different time and under other circumstances than Linux though.
- jamiek88 4y ago
  Yoo-nicks rather than yoo-nucks surely?
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    They're both pronounced "Yoo-nicks"
    - lproven 4y ago
      They really are not, you know.
  - Laaas 4y ago
    Unix: /ˈjuːnɪks/ Eunuch: /ˈjuː.nək/ Presumably the plural form retains the vowel, hence they are just a bit different.
  - housecarpenter 4y ago
    Some accents don't distinguish those two vowels in unstressed positions.
    - jamiek88 4y ago
      Like the Kiwi accent?! Didn't think of that! Thanks.
- aap_ 4y ago
  There's an anecdote that they answered the phone in the UNIX room with "eunuchs room" in a high pitched voice.
meekaaku 4y ago
There is a quote somewhere that says Linus names his programs after himself. Freax for freak, and then later git too. Git means an unpleasant person.
- kragen 4y ago
  people often use 'git' for people they think are unpleasant, but that is in order to insult them — 'git' means 'stupid person', not 'unpleasant person'
  - alexfoo 4y ago
    > 'git' means 'stupid person', not 'unpleasant person' Native English speaker (UK) and I've never heard 'git' used to mean 'stupid person'. I've only ever heard it used to mean 'unpleasant person', generally in the form of "complete git" or "utter git". (Of course, language use can be different in different countries.)

zabzonk 4y ago

i started using linux in the mid-90s, after using commercial unices for the previous 10 years. i was amazed at how well-engineered it all was. i think i was using slack - too long ago to remember. thanks linus.

b112 4y ago
The only guy I knew who used commercial unixes at home back then, lived in Seattle and loved to play games. Even got his girlfriend interested in them, which was unusual at the time. Come to think of it, I remember one day some government goons took him away, right around that big nuclear scare. And no one has heard from him ever since. Hmm.
- zabzonk 4y ago
  and your point is ... what?
  - b112 4y ago
    Are you David?

davidw 4y ago

> After finishing the game, Linus started learning Intel assembly language. One day he showed me a program that did multitasking. One task or thread would write a stream of the letter "A" on the screen, the other "B"; the context switches were visually obvious when the stream of As became Bs. This was the first version of what would later become known as the Linux kernel. Reminds me of: "Gall’s Law states that all complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked. If you want to build a complex system that works, build a simpler system first, and then improve it over time." I owe so much to Linux and the whole free software movement, as a self-taught programmer. I set up my first Linux computer in late 1995 - it was a laptop with 4 mb of memory (which wasn't much even then) running Slackware that I'd downloaded over a modem over the course of several days. It was so cool to realize I could examine and modify the source code for... all of it! And interact with the people who had written all of it. I was hooked. I'm still using Linux as my primary development system these days.

dopheide 4y ago
I recall a friend installing Slackware about this timeframe (1995), where you could select which packages you wanted. We missed groff. As a result we didn't have man pages, had no idea how to fix it, and ended up doing a re-install. I miss those days.
amadvance 4y ago
Same here. Started with Slackware 3.0 in 1995, the first one distributed in CDROM. Still on Slackware.

jjice 4y ago

If you're interested in Linux history, check out Just For Fun by Linus Torvalds himself. It's written in 1999 if I recall, which is so much closer to Linux's inception than it is to today, so it's so interesting to hear thoughts and predictions about Linux at the time. Super cheap book. I think I got my copy for $4 on ebay.

BanazirGalbasi 4y ago
I found this book in my local library when I was in college, it was a really fun read. I had recently finished the OS course which used PintOS[1] and wanted to learn more about the development process. Unfortunately my C is still fairly rudimentary, and at this point it's going to be a bit longer before I attempt to follow Linus's path. 1: https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/cs140-spring20/pintos/pintos_1.html https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/cs140-spring20/pint...
nik_0_0 4y ago
+1 - Finished reading it this year, very fun read and much in the same vein as this article.
ndesaulniers 4y ago
Linus signed my copy!
- jjice 4y ago
  Very jealous! If I every get the chance to go to a conference where he'll be, I'll absolutely bring by copy!
oblio 4y ago
For a more generic FOSS perspective, https://www.amazon.com/Rebel-Code-Linux-Source-Revolution/dp/0738206709 https://www.amazon.com/Rebel-Code-Linux-Source-Revolution/dp... is a very nice read. Cristi Vlăsceanu, if you're around, many thanks for the books. The OS one I gave to a Poli student that was very passionate about OSes.

eamonnsullivan 4y ago

Great read. The first distribution I used was TAMU (https://archiveos.org/tamu/ https://archiveos.org/tamu/) in 1992, when Linux wasn't yet at 1.0. I had to download dozens of floppy disk images. In those days, getting X to run involved real risk. Get some of the parameters wrong and you could destroy your monitor. My five kids (all in their 20s and 30s now) grew up running Linux. It's still the OS I choose when the option is available.

MilStdJunkie 4y ago
That was still a thing in 1998, when I got saddled with supporting the Slack boxes. Perspiration!
incanus77 4y ago
Same here for RH 5.1 in ‘98. I spent most of a summer messing around with trying to get the proper video modes working on my graphics card and learning the ins and outs of X configuration. Then came the sound card…
sillystuff 4y ago
> X to run involved real risk. Get some of the parameters wrong and you could destroy your monitor. The flexibility also allowed you to accomplish neat things. I was spoiled by high res 21" workstation monitors at school, so my laptop with a 640 x 480 screen was very limiting. But, telling X that the LCD was a multiscan monitor made every other scan line go to /dev/null-- the effect was a pseudo-resolution of 640x960 with scrunched up, but very readable fonts. Ran that setup for years.

kiss-o-matic 4y ago

[flagged]

krossitalk 4y ago

> the X11 system was ported to it, making 1992 the year of the Linux desktop. That's rich!

zomg 4y ago
I literally busted out laughing! We've been waiting all these years and... we missed it?!? xD
Accujack 4y ago
I remember running X the first time on Linux just after it was reported working because I happened to have the exact chipset that Peter MacDonald supported in my 386 at the time. We ran it off of a boot and root floppy - both 3.5", 1.44MB disks. We didn't do much with it at the time, but it was a big deal... we had only run X on workstations before that, and they were expensive and few and far between.

earthscienceman 4y ago

I absolutely love articles like this that humanize the creation of such a megalithic thing. It was just someone who was curious enough to tinker for a while on a project who was hanging out with friends. I love it. I think it would be hard to overstate the impact of Linux and free software. I do climate science research and its pretty obvious that every single paper that contains an important finding was built on FOSS. Latex, Linux, python, all the gnu tools, and so much more. Imagine being a researcher who needed to write any of that, or pay for all of that, in order to work. It's incredible. Thanks to everyone who codes, builds, or contributes to such projects. Also, it's laughable how little that is recognized in the science community.

asciii 4y ago
> It was just someone who was curious enough to tinker for a while on a project who was hanging out with friends. The modern world is underpinned by such discoveries--very accidental or curious types that go on to change the world and impact a lot of people. To quote a Steve Job's line: "I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well-being" [0] [0]: https://putsomethingback.stevejobsarchive.com/ https://putsomethingback.stevejobsarchive.com/
- earthscienceman 4y ago
  Absolutely. But also, as a species, we're such a fan of these narratives that lionize people like Steve jobs. A brief article written by a friend about a project from their college years is much more humanizing than anything I've read about Steve Jobs. Sure, there's the "garage beginnings" part of the story but even that is very much lionized as "grind and hustle". I think the way the myth of Steve Jobs and his impact on the world is a great example to juxtapose against Linus\Linux in so many ways. Linux runs nearly everything and was given away for free and the broader public is totally unaware. Steve Jobs sells hardware and constantly played up the lion narrative as a push to make money and be important. Im more interested in the former than the lot. Inflammatory comment? Maybe. But I think we need to shift the values that we collectively encourage and this article is fantastic.

sdfghswe 4y ago

Wait, does this mean that Linux what programmed on MINIX?

deleted 4y ago
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ajross 4y ago
Yes, it was bootstrapped from a minix install. The earliest filesystem was in fact minixfs, to share files with the development host environment.

mnw21cam 4y ago

I'm pretty sure Linus used Doom to stress-test the memory-management, not Quake. I have had a quote in my stash for ages: I've run DOOM more in the last few days than I have the last few months. I just love debugging ;-) -- Linus Torvalds

rightbyte 4y ago
";-)" It looks so strange with the nose nowadays. But that was how people did it if I remember correctly.
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  I always used the nose even when my friends used noseless emoticons as the latter look like squished faces to me :-P
  - mwcremer 4y ago
    Huh! I always read that as sticking out one's tongue.
    - eyko 4y ago
      It is!
    - kelnos 4y ago
      The tongue was 'P'. Either ;P or ;-P (or :P or :-P).
- WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
  I still like to do these: :^) — with a nose that looks like, well, a nose, *<:^) — with a beanie hat, Ж:^) — with unkempt hair. Emojis bring some expression, but they take some away, too.
usefulcat 4y ago
This is correct; it was definitely doom in 93-94. I remember playing it then, and it was brand new at that time.

kyaghmour 4y ago

Some friends told me they ran into Andrew Tannenbaum at Embedded World a few years ago and asked him if he still believed that Minix was better than Linux. Apparently he said yes. DISCLAIMER: 2nd hand story.

cwillu 4y ago
If I routinely had strangers coming up to me picking arguments about something argument I made decades before (always the same thing), I'd pretty quickly come up with the minimum necessary reply to end the interaction as well.
guenthert 4y ago
Better for what? Tannenbaum is an educator and Minix an educational tool. It is arguably the better tool to teach operating systems.
Stratoscope 4y ago
Leaving aside which OS is "better", if you have an Intel processor you are very likely running Minix right now! https://www.google.com/search?q=What+Intel+firmware+contains+the+Minix+operating+system https://www.google.com/search?q=What+Intel+firmware+contains...

gumballindie 4y ago

Now _this_ is the kind of content that I crave for.

divbzero 4y ago

> During this time, late spring of 1991, I wrote an implementation of the C sprintf() function for [Linus Torvalds], as he hadn't yet learned how to write functions with variable argument lists. I wanted to spare him the pain of having a different function for every type of value to write out. That’s such a cool detail. Everyone starts somewhere. (Shuffling off to commit change to Git and deploy to Linux…)

Scubabear68 4y ago

This is a great read of a humble start of history. The A..B concurrency printing, helping Linus out implementing Sprintf, learning assembly. Building it all towards a coherent system. What was truly profound is how Linux and other open source systems and libraries completely cracked open systems software for the masses. Back in the early 90s, everything around Unix, operating systems, compilers, tools, everything was crazy expensive to buy. And all of a sudden here came this thundering herd of code that was all completely free. Of course Gnu stuff had been around for awhile, but Linux is what propelled it into warp speed adoption. In thr 90s I was privileged to work at Bear Stearns and had a Sparc Station on my desk and regular interactions with SunOS, Solaris, and HPUX for the guys downstairs. Outside of University and business, it was hard for individuals to break into it. By the late 90s any old anybody could get a CD ROM with Red Hat or whatever.

pacaro 4y ago
Absolutely. I remember the articles in the trade press in the mid 90s asking "Is UN*X dead?" (Hindsight of course tells us that Betteridge's law applied) But I was working for a small ISV making a windows based GIS and our customers were putting windows boxen on every desk in the office, and then ditching either intergraph based solutions or complex systems with Tektronix terminals. Our per seat license was a rounding error in their previous costs, and you could drag a selected rectangle from our map window and drop it into a word document. I occasionally helped with sales demos and you could see when the decision was made in the faces of the senior people when they saw this.
gspencley 4y ago
> By the late 90s any old anybody could get a CD ROM with Red Hat or whatever. That's exactly how I got into Linux. I bought a book about RedHat 5.2 with a CD ROM install disc in the sleeve :) Have been using Linux on all of my personal devices (and every work device that I'm allowed to) ever since. Oddly enough, I also had a Sparc Station 5 on my desk at one time. I remember the filesystem seemed very slow but it was cool as hell to be able to use "real Unix." I remember it even came with Internet Explorer of all things!
64bittechie 4y ago

mindcrime 4y ago

Aaah, yeah, the "good old days". I got started with Linux around 1995 or so. I don't actually remember which distribution I used first, as I was experimenting a lot back then. I remember using Turbo Linux, Yggdrasil, and Slackware at times. Sometime in 95 or 96 I was a student at UNC Wilmington and I remember a bunch of us were out in the courtyard by the C.S. building when somebody came up talking about this new company called "Red Hat" that was, get this, selling Linux! That led to some rather, erm, passionate, discussion that day. I actually wound up gravitating to Red Hat linux myself in the end, and to this day I still use RH oriented distros (mostly Fedora) for most things. And I even wound up working for Red Hat for a spell. So yeah, Linux and his "toy" kernel definitely had a huge impact on my life over the years. And so did Bob Young and his company that had the audacity to charge money for free software. :-)

mrits 4y ago
I installed slackware as a 12 year old in the early 90s. I only have 1 PC in the house (other computer was amiga 500 with no internet). My ISP only supported PPP connection which didn't work very well at the time on Linux. Since the PC was my only source to online help I literally had to reinstall windows and then slackware every time I made an attempt at getting it working. It took probably 15-20 rounds over a couple of months but when I got it felt like the biggest accomplishment of my life.
- microtonal 4y ago
  More or less the same (12 years in 1994), however we didn't have internet until some years later. I learned pretty much everything from a Dutch Linux book (which was on the market very early) and all the HOWTOs and guides from the Linux Documentation project.
sumtechguy 4y ago
I sort of remember the first one I had. It came on a couple of 3.5 floppies. I promptly ignored it for a year or so then came back and it was 20+ of them now for slackware with hundreds of utilities I had no idea what they did. That was a ton of fun digging thru.

ssklash 4y ago

> "Linux is running on every continent, on every ocean, on billions of devices, in orbit, and on Mars." What a fantastically cool sentence!

kyaghmour 4y ago

I can't find the article anymore (and I've looked for it several times in the past) but someone was making the point that open source was essentially an economic phenomenon. Insofar as distribution costs went to zero with the advent of mass-access to the internet then it was inevitable that people would start sharing software. Obviously this takes nothing away from all those early contributors, but it is food for thought. Mind you while Linux was taking off the BSDs were apparently busy in lawsuits. So, while the zeroing of distribution costs should've benefited them, it seems Linux was at the right place at the right time, minus the baggage.

toyg 4y ago
The problem with BSDs was not much the lawsuits but the fact that they didn't figure out a governance model that could scale. Linux had open mailing lists and low barriers to entry, BSDs had "core" cliques. Linux begat git, a distributed VCS, when BSDs were happy with the likes of CVS, where control is rigidly centralized. Etc etc.
- deleted 4y ago
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- arp242 4y ago
  git didn't appear until much much later; and maintainers who can pull in code is not so different than a "core clique" with a commit bit: it's till a relatively small group of people who decide what does and doesn't get merged – it's more of a workflow thing than anything else. Of all the possible factors this seems like the least convincing one.
retrac 4y ago
The "Net" in NetBSD (the first open source BSD community to coalesce after the lawsuits settled) refers to that, it's the network operating system. And not really in the sense of an OS for networks (though it certainly is that) but one from and of the network.
cesarb 4y ago
> Mind you while Linux was taking off the BSDs were apparently busy in lawsuits. So, while the zeroing of distribution costs should've benefited them, it seems Linux was at the right place at the right time, minus the baggage. There were other reasons. Reusing an older comment of mine (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32372063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32372063): My favorite theory for why Linux got a head start is in this (long) comment I found some time ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21420338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21420338 Some excerpts: "With Linux, I just booted from a Linux boot floppy with my Linux install CD in the CD-ROM drive, and ran the installation. With BSD...it could not find the drive because I had an IDE CD-ROM and it only supported SCSI." "It insisted on being given a disk upon which it could completely repartition. [...] Linux, on the other hand, was happy to come second after my existing DOS/Windows." "By the time the BSD people realized they really should be supporting IDE CD-ROM and get along with prior DOS/Windows on the same disk, Linux was way ahead."

taylorportman 4y ago

Not to be a GNU/Linux instigator but I remember when I first read the GPL how strange it was to have a legal document to give something away it seemed like a impish prank - will someone take it and insist you stop giving it away, or sue you when their production line breaks down.. And then the flamewars began, the pronunciation, the toolchain, freetards, 'open sores', etc. but it was the GPL making it all possible.

paulddraper 4y ago

> In 1991, Linus wrote that Linux "won't be big and professional like gnu". In 2023. Linux is running on every continent, on every ocean, on billions of devices, in orbit, and on Mars. Amazing

9front 4y ago

The Linux kernel took off after Linus receive the MINIX book, a.k.a Operating System Design and Implementation by Tanenbaum, which include the source code of MINIX. Until the arrival of the book Linus was playing "Prince Of Persia" on his new 386AT desktop.

snvzz 4y ago
If only if Linus actually listened to Tanenbaum. We could have a nice microkernel, multiserver design, instead of what we have. And we wouldn't have to deprecate Linux (soon now) to replace it with something better architected.
- fulafel 4y ago
  Are you still using Linux? Most of us moved to Hurd for exactly this reason already.
  - snvzz 4y ago
    I mostly use Linux, yes. As for HURD, I consider it a dead end, as it seems to have no direction and appears to have failed to move away from Mach.
- zajio1am 4y ago
  There were several microkernel-based research/hobby/free kernels in early 1990s, like L4, VSTa, or even HURD. Perhaps the reason why Linux succeeded as a general purpose OS (and not one of these) is because of its conservative design.
  - snvzz 4y ago
    Let's suppose it ended up like that. It would mean one of the BSDs would have become popular instead. And we'd be better for it.

vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago

[dead]

davidthewatson 4y ago

I found this article resplendent because Linux has given back to me what I put into it year after year since it launched the year I graduated college. What I wonder is this: is there a story happening now that has similar good will for the future of AI without having commercial or social computing as its basis? The reason I love Linux is that Linus started and finished before commercial and social concerns became the raison d'etre in software.

jimbokun 4y ago
Commercial concerns were also the raison d'être in software before and during the time Linus was creating Linux, too.

braindead_in 4y ago

I wonder if some day someone will write a similar story about early days of LLMs.

linhns 4y ago
"Engineering prompts in a maddening fashion so that it works the way I want it to be.". This sentence should be in that article

Votearome 4y ago

[flagged]

Votearome 4y ago

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snvsn 4y ago

Linus describes this and more in his book - Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. Great read

Rant423 4y ago
Agree. If you liked this article, pick up the book.

Votearome 4y ago

[flagged]

mhh__ 4y ago

This git tutorial from 2005ish is interesting https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/927a503cd07718ea0f700052043f383253904a56/Documentation/core-tutorial.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/927a503cd07718ea0f...

coldpie 4y ago
Looks like this eventually became gitcore-tutorial, which still ships with Git today.

jcadam 4y ago

I remember downloading Slackware floppy images from a local BBS the first time I wanted to try Linux. Good times.

jononomo 4y ago

The fact that Linus created both Linux and Git will never cease to impress me. I might even suggest that Linus is a "ten x programmer".

fifticon 4y ago
I wonder the number would be somewhat larger than 10.. Still, my hands can reach the keys on a keyboard, so I won't give up..

rufus_foreman 4y ago

How source control used to be done: >> the students shared a source tree over NFS and shouted "I'm editing this file" when they were changing something

capableweb 4y ago

This article is a goldmine of old, classic stuff and lots of information I have not yet read. Great read and nice of the author to share the experience, I hope people with these kind of experiences continue to share their subjective views on history. Unrelated but fun highlight from the mentioned newsletter: > Linux News #3 > Issue #3, October 18 through 26, 1992 > ** Highlights in this issue > - ed is here, editor wars are over

LastTrain 4y ago

Lovely article. My first install was Slackare 2.3, kernel version 1.2.13 on a 386sx. Thirteen floppies. I don't even remember why I installed it or where I'd heard of it. I don't think I even knew what Unix was, but I vividly remember the "darkstar $" prompt when it was all done and then my social life suffered for a few months...

jll29 4y ago

Thanks to Lars Wirzenius for sharing his first Linux (and Linus) memories. BTW, nowadays Lars teaches Rust using his own consultancy. I well remember (the younger me, a school kid) having to install 50 3.5" floppy disks FTP'd from the University of Karlsruhe's servers, only to discover that some where faulty & having to do it all over again. And then the reward of having the X11 logo and xeyes on your own desktop - 1992 was a fantastic year!

GoofballJones 4y ago

I began tinkering with Linux about 6 months after it's inception. I think....think...it was what became Slackware in what I gathered up the things to make it run on my Micron Pentium. This was in the day I was trying everything on that machine. I had DOS running on it at one point, then OS/2 Warp, then Windows 3.1, then Linux, then back to OS/2 etc etc. It was at a time where everything was up in the air, before Windows 95 took a major foothold.

mindcrime 4y ago
This was in the day I was trying everything on that machine. I had DOS running on it at one point, then OS/2 Warp, then Windows 3.1, then Linux, then back to OS/2 etc etc. Heh. I remember trying one time to get as many different OS's multi-booting on one physical box as I could. I think I had about 5 at one point, something like Windows 95, OS/2, Red Hat 6.2, FreeBSD (or maybe OpenBSD), Caldera Linux, and maybe something else. And then I tried to add one more (I think it was Solaris x86) and totally hosed everything and had to start over. Definitely the "good ole days". :-)

geoelkh 4y ago

awesome post!

linuxhansl 4y ago

Hah. Used SLS (and then Slackware) back then. I think the first version of the kernel I used was 0.98pl13. I worked at DEC back then and did not have Internet at home, so I would schedule jobs at night to download the 1.3" floppy images and then copy them to actual floppies to bring home. Can't believe that is 30 years ago now.

icedchai 4y ago
I also started with SLS, but got in a little later (late 92, maybe 93?) I think 0.99pl10 was where I started. I remember the 12 or 15 floppy images.
alexfoo 4y ago
For me the first one that sticks in my head is the MCC distrib on ~10 floppies, with (I think) a bunch more for X. Definitely used 0.9[89] before that (late '93) but no solid memory of details. Kernel version 1.0.8 is burned into my brain though.
martyvis 4y ago
Yep I did the same (I worked at BHP the Aussie industrial multinational, and funnily ended up at DEC in '97 and still work there via HPE). Initially I was doing the regular downloads to a SGI workstation and writing the floppy images out on I think on a DOS PC. Eventually I was able to repurpose an unused 386 at work to become my Linux server at work.

ttttyyyyyyyy 4y ago

[flagged]

bertmuthalaly 4y ago

I love the crossover with the Prince of Persia, which was also an early computer labor of love.

bitwize 4y ago

As an earlyish (1995) Linux adopter I'd heard some of these tales, like the fact that it started as a simple task scheduler that wrote a's and b's to the screen. But it's cool to hear it from someone who was actually there to witness those early events as they unfolded.

MarkusWandel 4y ago

One big takeaway is how close the real Unix (in the form of 386BSD) came to being where Linux is today. If it had been available freely one year earlier, Linux wouldn't have gained momentum. Would it be better to have one true free Unix-like OS now, rather than two? Did the free-for-all development in Linux depend on it having no "pure" ancestry? Nobody knows.

geocar 4y ago
> If it had been available freely one year earlier, Linux wouldn't have gained momentum. I doubt that. Real Unix was a pretty horrible experience for a lot of hobbyists starting right from the disklabel, and many of those smug bastards where pretty horrible people to hobbyists. The fact Linux worked on crap hardware meant people who could only afford crap hardware could learn it, and get good at it. Linux overtook Real Unix real fast in-terms of hardware support -- so fast I don't think *BSD ever stood a chance. Stability and quality is a double-edged sword: You think you gotta keep the crap out or it gets crap, but the reality is that crap is what makes it fun, and fun is why people used Linux and not Real Unix. If you want to make something great, you've got to do is focus on things that matter, and remember: fun matters more than scsi. > Would it be better to have one true free Unix-like OS now, rather than two? Did the free-for-all development in Linux depend on it having no "pure" ancestry? Nobody knows. Some people say "pure" and others say "inbred". I say this thing you're thinking about is a distraction: anything that prevents people from trying things out is slowing progress, there just ain't two ways around it. Worse is not better: It just means you don't know what's important. Better is better.
- anthk 4y ago
  Also, alternatives coming from Linux vs "the corporate Unix" often used far less memory and CPU and ran much faster. XTerm vs Rxvt Fvwm vs CDE Netscape/Mozilla vs Dillo Irix' MWM vs JWM
kikoreis 4y ago
Well, the reason Linus could confidently choose to license the kernel as GPLv2 is exactly because it inherited no incompatibly-licensed code. USL v. BSDi (also 1992 — what a year!) is evidence of how non-trivial this actually is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....

noobcoder 4y ago

It's hella amazing to see how Linux has been used in so many different industries and applications, from chip design to web servers to personal computers and moree. It's a testament to the flexibility and power of the open-source model, and the ingenuity of the community that has built and maintained it over the years

newswasboring 4y ago

This has to be the funniest tech article I have ever read. I was literally laughing out loud. I don't even remember the last time I had such an emotional response to a tech article. Probably it was something by whytheluckystiff back in my teenage.

quickthrower2 4y ago
There is almost a (probably misleading) glimmer of “i could have done that”, because the story is so human, he really did have to learn assembly by printing A and Bs, he didn’t have a grand design and just smash out an OS in vim and upload it! This is real agile programming.
commandersaki 4y ago
Lars has written about his interactions with Linus before in this article: https://liw.fi/linux20/ https://liw.fi/linux20/ I fondly remember these lines: That summer, I re-connected with my fellow students from the university, including Linus. One of the students a few years older than Linus and me, Patrik, had a sauna in the building he lived, and he booked it once a week for the group of us. You perverts who think the word sauna is a synonym for brothel can stop imagining orgies: in Finland, saunas are for bathing, medication, even meditation, not sex. There’s a semi-famous picture of Linus, looking naked, drinking beer. The picture was taken at Patrik’s, by a fellow student, Stina, and Linus is wearing trousers, but it was a hot summer day, so he didn’t have his shirt on. No orgies. Really.

unforgivenpasta 4y ago

> We decided to release version 1.0 and arranged a release event. The Finnish computer press was invited, and a TV station even sent a crew. Was this ever aired? Was it recorded? If so, is there a public archive of it somewhere?

bullion9872 4y ago
Found this after quick search https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaDpjlFpbfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaDpjlFpbfo
v7n 4y ago
Perhaps you missed the words "release event" being a hyperlink to this rather short clip on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaDpjlFpbfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaDpjlFpbfo Edit: Decided to add a link to a Finnish-language 27 minute documentary of Linus (21.1.1998) so this isn't just a duplicate comment. https://areena.yle.fi/1-50115178 https://areena.yle.fi/1-50115178

fatnoah 4y ago

Wow, this brings me back to the crazy days of college in the fall of 1994. My roommates and I ran a mish-mosh of OSs, including Windows (3.11), OS/2, and Linux (Slackware distro). The last was certainly the biggest challenge, but once we had remote xterms to campus servers, there was no need to slog to a computer lab. I also remember the era of free access to things. I had an account on some Stanford systems "just in case I wanted to run some stuff". It was a totally different time.

GoofballJones 4y ago
Yes, exactly. Around 1993-94 I was running through so many different OS's on my Micron Pentium. DOS, then OS/2 Warp, then Linux, then Windows 3.1, then back to OS/2, then to Linux. Drove my wife crazy.

teleforce 4y ago

It's strange that Lars did not mention about Yggdrasil Linux, it's probably the earliest Linux distro even before Slackware existed [1][2]. According to the article, 1992 is the year of Linux desktop by the introduction of X11 system but every year since then is allegedly the year of Linux on the desktop. Anyway this article has taken me back down memory lane, thanks Lars. 1) The Very 1st Linux OS Ever Made? https://www.linux.org/threads/the-very-1st-linux-os-ever-made.28596/ https://www.linux.org/threads/the-very-1st-linux-os-ever-mad... 2) Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X

bashtoni 4y ago
MCC interim was the first Linux distribution. Its creator had to implement what we would consider pretty fundamental tools, including fdisk. Yggdrasil was released half a year or so later, and included most of these tools. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCC_Interim_Linux https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCC_Interim_Linux
- teleforce 4y ago
  Yes, I stand corrected. In fact my friend who studied in UMIST (now part of University of Manchester) introduced me to Linux. The fact that Manchester Computing Centre (MCC) is based inside UoM probably make it accessible to him because at the time Linux was installed from floppies.
  - alexfoo 4y ago
    I miss my shell account on jumper.mcc.ac.uk

gabereiser 4y ago

This is great. A few years later I would stumble upon this new operating system. I was hooked. I spent all my time tinkering with it, building with it, so much so that I ignored the outside world around me. Case in point, me, ignoring the world around me [1]. I was maybe 13 at the time. 1996 I think. Man, the wonder of the unknown and the potential of the future… :D [1]: https://pasteboard.co/yOQrjCR8OsZh.jpg https://pasteboard.co/yOQrjCR8OsZh.jpg

kebman 4y ago

Very Finnish humour: "I recommend this method of installing Linux: napping, while Linus does the hard work." Kippis, folks!

commandersaki 4y ago
I wonder if Linus can install Arch without using the Arch Wiki.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kebman 4y ago
  That's funny! I'll still go ahead and attempt a somewhat serious answer. xD Arguably it's an addition to his original code that possibly modularizes his kernel in ways that he isn't familiar with, and that also might add completely new and unknown features to it. Thus it would probably behove him to read the Wiki either way. On the other hand, perhaps he's so 1337 that all he needs to do is to read the source code. My most major caveat here is that I don't myself know if there are any actual differences between his original kernel, and the code committed to the Arch Project. I thus think others are more qualified to say something intelligent about that, but these are my assumptions anyway. Hope you're having a great weekend! Skål!

meekaaku 4y ago

I wonder how much the overconfidence played in making it a success.

deleted 4y ago
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js2 4y ago

Circa 1996 I was getting my CS degree. At the same time, I got a job at a small local company running an ISP on the side. A dozen Hayes modems hooked up to a Livingston Portmaster. T1 uplink. And two PCs (named "hops" and "barley") running Slackware. That was my first experience with Linux. It was a barbaric OS compared to the Unix workstations we had in the CS department running HP/UX and SunOS. But it had promise... I think my first open source contribution was while working there (I added the "-e" switch to chpasswd) and it's still part of Linux today. Let's see... found it: https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow/blob/master/NEWS#L1780 https://github.com/shadow-maint/shadow/blob/master/NEWS#L178...

icedchai 4y ago
SunOS was also pretty bare bones, if I remember correctly. CS departments had to install a ton of 3rd party software to give you a usable system.
- js2 4y ago
  Yes, absolutely. But it was solid Unix OS with excellent documentation. I also worked for the CS department. We installed software centrally to an NFS server which was then automounted. We used something called "depot" from CMU to setup a software depot: https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=821346 https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=82134... https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/.cs.cmu.edu/help/content/unix_linux/software_collections/local_depot.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/.cs.cmu.edu/help/content/unix_lin... The biggest PITA about this scheme at the time was that you wanted "make install" to put software in one location (/depot/...), but you wanted that software to have paths compiled in as if it were in a different location (/usr/local/...). For the most part, the Makefiles that came with open source software then just weren't designed that way. You could set PREFIX but it was used for both the compiled-in paths as well as where "make install" put things. I recall spending a lot of time wrestling things into the depot scheme. Seems absurdly over-engineered looking at it now. Later in my career, I spent a lot of time building RPMs which was similarly painful but got easier over time. Software packaging... fun times.

nickdothutton 4y ago

I first installed Linux in secret on a spare partition of a Windows 386 at University. It was 1994, and for a while it was like having my own workstation, normally the Suns and VAXstations were reserved for the Post Docs and researchers. Because PCs were in abundance and both Sun and VMS systems restricted and tightly controlled, many of us setup home on that PC. It was anarchy.

jgilias 4y ago

I miss the days when Slack didn’t mean a chat app.

worik 4y ago
Warmed over IRC Strange days
phone8675309 4y ago
A Subgenius needs slack

bla3 4y ago

Tangential, but it's kind of pleasing that Lars WirzeNius is writing an article for lwn.net.

20after4 4y ago
Indeed when I first saw the link I misinterpreted it as a link to Lars’ personal blog.

freedomben 4y ago

What a great sense of humor this author has! I literally lol'ed at some of these jokes. It's hard to make humor shine through writing, so I'm double impressed. Some of the best, but don't deprive yourself of the whole article (because it's a gem): > More importantly for the future success of Linux was that the X11 system was ported to it, making 1992 the year of the Linux desktop. > Thus, mine was the first PC where Linux was ever installed. While this was happening, I was taking a nap, and I recommend this method of installing Linux: napping, while Linus does the hard work. > A couple of years later, he spent days playing Quake, ostensibly to stress-test kernel memory management, although that was with a newer PC. Much fun was had in that room, and there were no pranks whatsoever. None at all. > Alas, early Linux networking code was occasionally a little rough, having been written from scratch. At one point, Linux would send some broken packets that took down all of the Sun machines on the network. As it was difficult to get the Sun kernel fixed, Linux was banned from the university network until its bug was fixed. Not having Usenet access from one's desk is a great motivator. > In the spring of 1994 we felt that Linux was done. Finished. Nothing more to add. One could use Linux to compile itself, to read Usenet, and run many copies of the xeyes program at once. We decided to release version 1.0 and arranged a release event. > I insisted that a version-control system be used. I had witnessed students in earlier courses do the shouting kind of version control: the students shared a source tree over NFS and shouted "I'm editing this file" when they were changing something. This did not seem like an effective method to me, so I insisted on CVS, > In 1997 Linus graduated and moved to the US to take a job at Transmeta. I took a job at a different university in the Helsinki area. In the following years, many things happened. It turned out that there were still a few missing features from Linux, so people worked on those. > The term "open source" was coined and IBM invested a ton of money in Linux development. Netscape published a version of its web browser as open source. Skipping a few details and many years, open source basically took over the world. LWN was started and covered much of this history on a week-by-week basis.

chucknthem 4y ago
The 2nd part of the CVS section was funny too "[...] This experience is why Linus dislikes CVS and for years refused to use any version control beyond uploading tar balls to FTP sites." It's deadpan humor in written form.

7373737373 4y ago

Interesting that they were aware of Plan9 from the beginning!

kevsamuel 4y ago

LWN is consistently good, I really should subscribe.

raarts 4y ago

I first downloaded Slackware in June '93. I needed 13 diskettes. Installed it on my Compaq 386/SX 4Mb laptop, and spent the rest of the year learning myself Linux. In November '93 I founded one of the first internet providers in The Netherlands, and I'm pretty certain my family was the first Dutch family that had always-on public internet from the home. Also I might have been one of the first companies in the NL to run Linux in a business-critical environment. Linux always kept me from running Windows on my desktop. Although I switched to the Mac in 2005 after big problems get multimedia And graphics to work reliably. Without Linux my life would have been completely different. It allowed me to create a new future for myself. So I'm hugely grateful for its existence.

hamilyon2 4y ago

I really hope that in a sense today is still early days of Linux. What a beautiful software which taught me such a lot of things.

emmelaich 4y ago

I was doing CS at a similar time. Used Ultrix and HP-UX at work. Until Linux and Minix it was very hard to get a Unix on a PC. Someone had SystemV running, not sure how. Once Linux appeared, other home Unixes started evaporating, except for *BSDs. I was at the very first Sydney Linux Users Group meeting (SLUG). Have pics! The only pics of that event. Have tried to get permission from others so I can share, but no response :-(. Might share them anyway. Later in the 90s we had Linus over for a conference. Had a day out the harbour, good times. Got an excellent shot of Linus's head framed by the Opera House. Then found I had no film in the camera! Linux came back to Australia more than a few times of course. On one of these he was infamously bitten* by a Fairy Penguin. * Not sure if you could describe such a tiny animal as having a bite!

martyvis 4y ago
I'm pretty sure you should share them (statue of limitations and all that ;-) ). I probably went to my first SLUG meeting maybe '94 or '95. (I bought my 1st PC specially for dual booting DOS and Linux with Slackware early '93)

markus_zhang 4y ago

Interesting stories, thanks for sharing. I'm wondering, is there any tutorial to guide one from a bootloader to a very early version of Linux (but already have the barebone programs)? I guess any serious OS Dev course will do that, but would be interesting to find one specifically focused on Linux.

20after4 4y ago
Get an old iso of Slackware and do it from scratch. For the authentic experience do it without internet access and using only the included install instructions. I once attempted this as an exercise on a very old thinkpad having only DOS+mscdex on the hard drive and a Slackware 2.1 CD-ROM. Bootstrapping that system is a feat that I’m still proud of. Though it was sort of a pointless exercise for my own gratification.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  That's how I did it in 1995. I printed a few howto's, downloaded 27 or so Slackware floppy disk images, copied those onto actual disks, and biked home and booted from the first disk to start the installation process. At some point I had an issue with a corrupted disk so I had to bike back to the university to create a replacement. Following the howto, I got a booting system on my PC (dual booting with MS Dos/windows 3.x). And then using the bundled documentation, I was able to get X up and running, figured out how to rebuild the kernel with the sound drivers I needed, etc. Fun times.

thewanderer1983 4y ago

I started using Linux in my early teen years. I'm now 39. When I started I had dial up internet and it took me a week to get my Win Modem to work. I would boot into Win95 join a IRC server like dalnet, jump on #Linuxhelp and ask for suggestions. Reboot the system into Linux and try it out. Then repeat. I think the early community deserves a big thanks, especially those on IRC.

nortonham 4y ago

more than anything else this is just a really well written article

sedatk 4y ago

> At one point, Linux would send some broken packets that took down all of the Sun machines on the network. As it was difficult to get the Sun kernel fixed, Linux was banned from the university network until its bug was fixed. Well well well, who's running on the university network now?

brundolf 4y ago

> I had witnessed students in earlier courses do the shouting kind of version control: the students shared a source tree over NFS and shouted "I'm editing this file" when they were changing something We did exactly this for a project my freshman year of college, in 2011, except it was Dropbox instead of NFS :)

starbase 4y ago

I felt SOO late to the game when I got into Linux in the 90s. And now I'm that old motherfucker with a quarter century under my belt. Holy hell, time flies.

alexnastase 4y ago

Posts like these are the reason why I'm checking HN. It's really nice to read about Linux's humble beginnings especially given how wide-spread it has become today.

pjmlp 4y ago

> The term "open source" was coined and IBM invested a ton of money in Linux development. What goes around comes around, and now Red-Hat belongs to IBM.

martyvis 4y ago

To those that wondered what it was like to get Linux running in those early days, here is a post I made in April 1993 (30 years ago this month!) to the "comp.os.linux" Usenet group trying to dual boot Linux and DOD on my new 486 PC with I think no more than a 80MB harddrive. (BTW a2,a3,a3 refer to the first 3 floppy disks you need after the boot and I think root disk to start installing) Help installing Linux. 5/4/93 Hi, I,ve tried to install the SLS base system 99p6. I partitioned my 210 Maxtor drive to half DOS and then added a 15M /dev/hda2 (type 81 Linux,Minix) and 10M /dev/hda3 (type 83 Linux swap). After writing to the partition table and rebooting, I did a mkfs /dev/hda2 15504; mkswap /dev/hda3 4096; swapon /dev/hda3. After then running doinstall things seemed OK until it tried to start installing a2,a3 and a4. The system only looked at the disks for about a millisecond and then prompted me to insert the next one ( I was thinking, Boy! this installation is quick). Finally I got the prompt for formatted disk to make a boot disk. Thinking, I had finished, I attempted to boot this disk to no avail. Of course during doinstall I got messages such as "mv: command not found", "rm: command not found" and so forth. I am guessing that my /dev/hda2 is not mounting and hence the file system is not being transferred. I have been trying to dissassemble "doinstall" as most errors seem to be redirected to /dev/null. One "error" I noted on booting is "WD8013 not found at 280 ". Can't the driver find my disk controller? I have a TMC 486/33 motherboard with a VESA IDE controller. Linux seems to be able access the disk because the partitioning worked and mkfs -c works the disk out. Please help me out , I would love to get Linux up and running.

pastage 4y ago
I went full Linux directly! My problems where more along the lines of having enough space to recompile the kernel and work on my own projects.
x7ci 4y ago
Interesting. It's actually not very different from posts you'll see today on, for example, the newbie section of Arch Linux forums.

NotCamelCase 4y ago

To me, one of the most remarkable aspects of this story and reading others' comments is how relatively quickly people seem to have picked up Linux despite the lack of modern high-speed internet and one-click away forums and networks we all enjoy today. I guess that's an inevitable outcome if the market is ripe for some change no matter the opposing forces, like missing features, strong alternatives or no commercial support, etc.

aa-jv 4y ago
One of my earliest great Linux experiences was when I set up my 486 to download all of the floppy images (or maybe it was the Yggdrasil .iso), then went to Op Amp Bookstore in Los Angeles for lunch, finding myself an Yggdrasil distro, returning home, cancelling the download and getting on with it .. That was really a watershed for me: the whole thing on a single CD .. wow! And bootable, also!

johndoe0815 4y ago

If you want to take a closer look at the early days of the Linux kernel, I can recommend "A Heavily Commemted Linux Kernel Source Code", a listing of Linux kernel 0.12 with comments in the style of John Lions‘ commentary on 6th edition Unix (available in Chinese and English): http://www.oldlinux.org/ http://www.oldlinux.org/

gforce_de 4y ago

"That year (1995) was also when Linux was first ported to a new architecture by Linus. He'd been given a DEC Alpha machine." This is not fully correct: The first port ever was on Motorola M68k in 1993 for the Amiga platform. https://www.tech-insider.org/linux/research/1993/0915.html https://www.tech-insider.org/linux/research/1993/0915.html

lonelygirl15a 4y ago
I think the Alpha port stands out in memory because that was the cause for overcoming 32-bitness.

agentultra 4y ago

What a great article! I remember installing Linux on my friend’s PC. I think it was either 1997 or 1998 and he’d bought a retail copy of Mandrake. We took it back to his place and got it installed and running on his 200mhz Intel PC. I installed it on my machine too. What a game changer it turned out to be.

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