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One thing I often think about in the early days of Linux is it's competitors. The article mentions "commercial Unix was so expensive it was easier to write you

One thing I often think about in the early days of Linux is it's competitors. The article mentions "commercial Unix was so expensive it was easier to write your own". Which is largely true. However there is also Coherent Unix. I remember adverts for it as the full back page of so many magazines of the day, for $99. I always was on the fence about buying it. One of the big drawbacks of Coherent was that it didn't have any networking. Then, Linux came out, and it was shockingly shortly after that that Linux surpassed Coherent, and Coherent vanished seemingly overnight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)

arp242 2y ago
Reading a review from Dec 1990[1], it doesn't seem that brilliant: "Coherent remains true to Unix's roots and eschews local area networking, graphical user interfaces, menus, mice, and many of the other amenities that present-day DOS users and Unix users have come to expect of modern software." It goes on to describe that "learning Unix from Coherent would be a bumpy road" and "nor could you realistically use Coherent to automate a small business". Coherent was closed-source, so you couldn't take an imperfect incomplete system like Linux and help improve it. Linux attracted contributors early on not because Linux at the time was so great, but because people liked to work on this kind of thing. $99 is ~$230 today. I know software used to be a lot more expensive in general (e.g. $25 for PKZIP in the late 80s), but $230 for a bare-bones OS for playing around is only "cheap" relative to Enterprise Unix™® pricing. [1]: https://books.google.ie/books?id=JZxkO0PpksUC&pg=PT61&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.ie/books?id=JZxkO0PpksUC&pg=PT61&redir_...
- ForTheKidz 2y ago
  Did it not have some kind of ncurses functionality? So much of what I see about software from the eighties (mostly via movies) seems operable with just an unnetworked unix terminal.
jmclnx 2y ago
>However there is also Coherent Unix. I was a customer and it was very good, I use to use kermit to dial into a Sun System at work and it would call me back so I would avoid charges. That was to get USENET and general Internet access. Fun times. It is too bad they had to fold, be to be honest by 1995 the writting was on the wall, When they folded, I went to Slackware, which I still use. Back then, Linux was changing almost daily. Coherent had one thing that Linux could not do, but via USENET I asked and someone supplied a patch for me within days. It would allow me to use 2 monitors with 2 cards on my 386sx, a BW and a VGA just like what Coherent was able to do. People were far more accessible back then until the fortune 500 companies got involved in the 2000s.
- ahartmetz 2y ago
  Yes, people were really accessible when the community was small. I remember calling, by phone, some (also German) guy about a printer problem - my Samsung printer's Epson emulation apparently wasn't good enough for my distro's Epson driver. It must have been in '98 or '99. He was either the printer guy at S.u.S.E. (name at the time) or maintaining a relevant driver. We chatted for about an hour and I remember being impressed by how willing to engage he was and by his collection of workstation-class computers. But my printer problem remained unsolved :D
  - stmw 2y ago
    This is a really important difference
  - OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
    As a burnt out contributor, my first couple chats debugging for users were beautiful. But then they just kept coming and coming in droves upon droves and I had to set up a wall to let me focus on the work, which soured my relationship with users, which became an ever-increasing stress... Bless those contributors who were able to keep it up. They're the ones who should have Big Tech salaries, not those of us who gave up and sold our souls to Ad tech.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
femto 2y ago
It's interesting to ponder whether we would all be using GNU Hurd if Linux didn't exist.
- skissane 2y ago
  More likely we’d all be using FreeBSD
- nobleach 2y ago
  This is assuming that many of the folks who put their time and effort into the Linux kernel would have instead worked on Hurd. The thing is, nothing was stopping them from making that choice - other than maybe the popularity of Linux. I would love to see that timeline though.
icedchai 2y ago
Yep! I remember that time. I ran Coherent briefly (1991 - 1992 or so) before getting into early Linux distros like SLS.
a-dub 2y ago
ahh yes, coherent. where i cut my teeth on unix style systems. it supported memory protection on 286 cpus (true segmentation!) but had no ip stack (uucp was supported though). no x or graphics. pretty good documentation in a big doorstop they called "the lexicon.", a decent c tool chain, a custom port of emacs (microemacs they called it). only other unix i played with before that was some port on the atari st, which incidentally was a first class platform for the mark williams c compiler (mwc was the company behind coherent). it fit on two disks. where i had a massive stack of floppies for slackware (kernel 0.99pl2). linux was more fun- it was open source by and of the internet. fun times!
stmw 2y ago
Indeed, this is really interesting question about Linux and Linus in the early days - it obviously wasn't just the price of the alternatives or the overall concept of ~Unix-on-x86 - there was something different about Linus Torvalds' approach even early on, and one can see glimpses of it in these early stories.
emmelaich 2y ago
Hate to say but Microsoft's Xenix was so fast on a i386. Did a lot of scientific programming on it in 1991/2.
xtracto 2y ago
I remember installing FreeBSD in 1994. Ot was soooo cool to me as a 13 year old to startx and have a Unix like environment in my computer. I feel freebsd was superior to Linux,but as with other things, apps availability made the win
atombender 2y ago
Also, the BSDs were emerging around the same time, in particular 386BSD [1]. Linus was famously quoted as saying that if it had been available in the early days, he would probably never have made Linux [2]. The first release of 386BSD was in 1992, so we are talking about a short time window of 1-2 years here. And of course FreeBSD and NetBSD forked from it shortly after that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD [2] https://www.antman.se/abc-klubben/linux/linuxdoc/linus.html https://www.antman.se/abc-klubben/linux/linuxdoc/linus.html
rjsw 2y ago
I ran 386/ix [1] on a i386 PC from 1987, switched to 386BSD 0.1 in late 1992, then FreeBSD sometime in 1993. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Systems_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Systems_Corporatio...

arp242 2y ago

Reading a review from Dec 1990[1], it doesn't seem that brilliant: "Coherent remains true to Unix's roots and eschews local area networking, graphical user interfaces, menus, mice, and many of the other amenities that present-day DOS users and Unix users have come to expect of modern software." It goes on to describe that "learning Unix from Coherent would be a bumpy road" and "nor could you realistically use Coherent to automate a small business". Coherent was closed-source, so you couldn't take an imperfect incomplete system like Linux and help improve it. Linux attracted contributors early on not because Linux at the time was so great, but because people liked to work on this kind of thing. $99 is ~$230 today. I know software used to be a lot more expensive in general (e.g. $25 for PKZIP in the late 80s), but $230 for a bare-bones OS for playing around is only "cheap" relative to Enterprise Unix™® pricing. [1]: https://books.google.ie/books?id=JZxkO0PpksUC&pg=PT61&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.ie/books?id=JZxkO0PpksUC&pg=PT61&redir_...

ForTheKidz 2y ago
Did it not have some kind of ncurses functionality? So much of what I see about software from the eighties (mostly via movies) seems operable with just an unnetworked unix terminal.

jmclnx 2y ago

>However there is also Coherent Unix. I was a customer and it was very good, I use to use kermit to dial into a Sun System at work and it would call me back so I would avoid charges. That was to get USENET and general Internet access. Fun times. It is too bad they had to fold, be to be honest by 1995 the writting was on the wall, When they folded, I went to Slackware, which I still use. Back then, Linux was changing almost daily. Coherent had one thing that Linux could not do, but via USENET I asked and someone supplied a patch for me within days. It would allow me to use 2 monitors with 2 cards on my 386sx, a BW and a VGA just like what Coherent was able to do. People were far more accessible back then until the fortune 500 companies got involved in the 2000s.

ahartmetz 2y ago
Yes, people were really accessible when the community was small. I remember calling, by phone, some (also German) guy about a printer problem - my Samsung printer's Epson emulation apparently wasn't good enough for my distro's Epson driver. It must have been in '98 or '99. He was either the printer guy at S.u.S.E. (name at the time) or maintaining a relevant driver. We chatted for about an hour and I remember being impressed by how willing to engage he was and by his collection of workstation-class computers. But my printer problem remained unsolved :D
- stmw 2y ago
  This is a really important difference
- OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
  As a burnt out contributor, my first couple chats debugging for users were beautiful. But then they just kept coming and coming in droves upon droves and I had to set up a wall to let me focus on the work, which soured my relationship with users, which became an ever-increasing stress... Bless those contributors who were able to keep it up. They're the ones who should have Big Tech salaries, not those of us who gave up and sold our souls to Ad tech.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

femto 2y ago

It's interesting to ponder whether we would all be using GNU Hurd if Linux didn't exist.

skissane 2y ago
More likely we’d all be using FreeBSD
nobleach 2y ago
This is assuming that many of the folks who put their time and effort into the Linux kernel would have instead worked on Hurd. The thing is, nothing was stopping them from making that choice - other than maybe the popularity of Linux. I would love to see that timeline though.

icedchai 2y ago

Yep! I remember that time. I ran Coherent briefly (1991 - 1992 or so) before getting into early Linux distros like SLS.

a-dub 2y ago

ahh yes, coherent. where i cut my teeth on unix style systems. it supported memory protection on 286 cpus (true segmentation!) but had no ip stack (uucp was supported though). no x or graphics. pretty good documentation in a big doorstop they called "the lexicon.", a decent c tool chain, a custom port of emacs (microemacs they called it). only other unix i played with before that was some port on the atari st, which incidentally was a first class platform for the mark williams c compiler (mwc was the company behind coherent). it fit on two disks. where i had a massive stack of floppies for slackware (kernel 0.99pl2). linux was more fun- it was open source by and of the internet. fun times!

stmw 2y ago

Indeed, this is really interesting question about Linux and Linus in the early days - it obviously wasn't just the price of the alternatives or the overall concept of ~Unix-on-x86 - there was something different about Linus Torvalds' approach even early on, and one can see glimpses of it in these early stories.

emmelaich 2y ago

Hate to say but Microsoft's Xenix was so fast on a i386. Did a lot of scientific programming on it in 1991/2.

xtracto 2y ago

I remember installing FreeBSD in 1994. Ot was soooo cool to me as a 13 year old to startx and have a Unix like environment in my computer. I feel freebsd was superior to Linux,but as with other things, apps availability made the win

atombender 2y ago

Also, the BSDs were emerging around the same time, in particular 386BSD [1]. Linus was famously quoted as saying that if it had been available in the early days, he would probably never have made Linux [2]. The first release of 386BSD was in 1992, so we are talking about a short time window of 1-2 years here. And of course FreeBSD and NetBSD forked from it shortly after that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD [2] https://www.antman.se/abc-klubben/linux/linuxdoc/linus.html https://www.antman.se/abc-klubben/linux/linuxdoc/linus.html

rjsw 2y ago

I ran 386/ix [1] on a i386 PC from 1987, switched to 386BSD 0.1 in late 1992, then FreeBSD sometime in 1993. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Systems_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Systems_Corporatio...