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I remember the early days of Linux well. There was quite a bit of interest for it at the University of Waterloo in the mid 90s, but there was also a lot of talk
by jasoneckert 2y ago
I remember the early days of Linux well. There was quite a bit of interest for it at the University of Waterloo in the mid 90s, but there was also a lot of talk of issues getting it to install, or getting it to run stably on certain systems (albeit not uncommon for any OS at the time). Those were the days of having to know how to compile your own kernel and fight with XFree86.
Linux distributions like Red Hat really squashed those concerns within a short time and made things much easier on all fronts. Their documentation was also excellent.
By the late 1990s, Red Hat was as common as Solaris, AIX, and IRIX at the university, but most still considered it inferior to Solaris. And now, RHEL is the main *nix system used there (a few use Debian).
- ttyprintk 2y agoI think this is consistent with big universities at the time. I remember when Alpha was becoming discontinued, reinstalling RedHat on those did give Linux a boost as a daily driver for researchers.
- jasoneckert 2y agoLinux definitely breathed life into that great platform. I still have an Alpha Personal Workstation 600au in my basement running Red Hat from that time period.
- cbm-vic-20 2y agoI had a Jensen (DECpc AXP 150) and an Alpha Multia; there were the first targets for Windows NT 3.51 on Alpha, but I had early Alpha Linux running on them. These might still be buried in the basement of my parents' house. Not as cool as the OSF/1-based DECserver 2100 "Sable" at work. I loved that machine.
- ajross 2y ago> Those were the days of having to know how to compile your own kernel and fight with XFree86. It was the XF86Config modeline HOWTO that taught me how a CRT controller works.
- mananaysiempre 2y agoTried installing Solaris in a VM recently, and the installer immediately and starkly brought back memories of the one from a Red Hat derivative I didn’t realize I even remembered. I’m not old enough to have been involved with commercial Unices at the time, but even looking back it appears that Red Hat knew very clearly who they were aiming at.