4 ms·
But unix was not installed by default on the massively sold PCs. This is the little catch they did miss at the time.
by sylware 3y ago
But unix was not installed by default on the massively sold PCs.
This is the little catch they did miss at the time.
- anthk 3y agoWell, installing GNU/Linux on 1995 was not easy. On 1997-1999, with Slackware or Red Hat, it was almost manageable.
- nubinetwork 3y agoRedhat 7 from ~2000 was a pretty bad experience, most of the time I couldn't get a working display driver, and the stock vga driver was dog slow.
- pjmlp 3y agoWhen I went to CERN in 2002, it was the first time I used GNU/Linux in production, and even them had to start the Scientific Linux project in collaboration with Fermilab, to have something that could replace the Solaris use cases. Most researchers were either on Windows 2000 or the newly released OS X.
- icedchai 3y agoX11 was a clown show for a longgg time. Remember manually tweaking mode lines? For the longest time, my main Linux system was a Slackware box with almost everything rebuilt and reinstalled by hand. I still remember the a.out -> ELF upgrade and having to rebuild a bunch of libraries. And rebuilding the kernel, of course.
- mcculley 3y ago> Remember manually tweaking mode lines? I put my first Linux box together in late 1992 using SLS and a fixed frequency monitor. I got the mode line wrong and the magic black smoke escape from the monitor.
- pjmlp 3y agoYes, and only being able to do 800x600 on a 1024x768 display. That was my first Linux distribution, Slackware 2.0 with 1.0.99 kernel, if I got the numbers right. I already used Xenix and DG/UX by then, and it was a way to have UNIX at home.
- saltcured 3y agoBack in those early days with XFree86, it was exciting to get 2D accelerator drivers going so we could turn on "opaque window moves" in our window managers. By having the window contents "blitted" around on the card, we could finally move the actual window around instead of just a thin outline that would repaint after we stopped moving it. This required the graphics card to do it locally since there wasn't enough bus bandwidth nor cpu speed to have a software implementation copy around the window content in realtime!
- pjmlp 3y agoIt was installed by default on Workstations, which was its market. However you could buy PCs with Xenix or Coherent, which were anyway quite limited given PCs hardware.
- kps 3y agoWhere I worked at the time, we had PCs (initially 386) running System V. They also had X on 1600×1200 monochrome displays, which were absolutely beautiful, monochrome CRTs not having issues with convergence or fringing. (I think the monitors and cards to drive them probably cost more than the rest of the machine.)
- saltcured 3y agoThat reminds me of what I think were Apollo Domain/OS workstations at school that also had beautiful, high-res black and white screens. These were in the basement of Evans Hall at UC Berkeley back in the early/mid 90s. Judging by the Domain/OS release timeline on the wikipedia page, it seems reasonable that these were surplus (end of life) systems handed over for student use. It's too long ago, and I can't remember if they were managed by the CSUA computer club or something else by the CS department as part of the WEB which I think was mostly a Sun workstation farm.
- kjellsbells 3y agoI am sure this is a get off my lawn moment, but I think those grayscale displays are long overdue for a comeback, in our age of attention-grabbing apps. Im trying to recreate the experience on my phone and PC right now in fact. Definitely helps on android, but on win11, im stillntrying to find the right combo of accessibility settings and windows themes to get it right.