2 ms·

The dirty truth: Marketing. Back in the 90s there was a major push to market Linux by a wide number of vendors from Red Hat to IBM if I recall correctly. In th

The dirty truth: Marketing. Back in the 90s there was a major push to market Linux by a wide number of vendors from Red Hat to IBM if I recall correctly. In the dot.com 1.0 era you couldn't leave a tradeshow without being given a t-shirt or stuffed toy of the tux mascot. You could also go into a bookstore, but a book on a book on Linux and get a free CD with an installer. You could also go into a computer store of that era and buy a boxed copy of Linux. This made Linux really popular with the first generation of web geeks.

derleth 14y ago
True, except BSD had an installed base and a base of advocates back then dating back to the 1970s. BSD was the hacker Unix back when you could still credibly build a workstation around Motorola 68000 derivatives. Now, the standard narrative here is that BSD was under a legal cloud in the early 1990s due to the USL v. BSDi lawsuit, but BSDs still existed in 1993, when the lawsuit was settled. Was the Linux marketing machine that dominant in 1993? Even before the kernel had hit version 1.0?
- michaelpinto 14y ago
  I think that's why BSD became to base of NeXT which was really in the workstation space at the time (and would later become Apple OS X). The thing with Linux was that many early web hackers would take a used PC and turn it into a server as their first hello world project. However many of these webmasters weren't hardcore Unix geeks with CS degrees but hobbyists -- and then the hobbyists turned pro.
russgray 14y ago
I remember my first home distro (outside of the university labs) was Definite Linux, in 2000. The installation CD came free with a magazine.
hollerith 14y ago
For a while in the 1990s, the leader of FreeBSD, Jordan Hubbard, was recommending people coming from Windows to choose Linux rather than BSD on the desktop. I do not recall his reasoning. Maybe something to do with better support for video cards.

derleth 14y ago

True, except BSD had an installed base and a base of advocates back then dating back to the 1970s. BSD was the hacker Unix back when you could still credibly build a workstation around Motorola 68000 derivatives. Now, the standard narrative here is that BSD was under a legal cloud in the early 1990s due to the USL v. BSDi lawsuit, but BSDs still existed in 1993, when the lawsuit was settled. Was the Linux marketing machine that dominant in 1993? Even before the kernel had hit version 1.0?

michaelpinto 14y ago
I think that's why BSD became to base of NeXT which was really in the workstation space at the time (and would later become Apple OS X). The thing with Linux was that many early web hackers would take a used PC and turn it into a server as their first hello world project. However many of these webmasters weren't hardcore Unix geeks with CS degrees but hobbyists -- and then the hobbyists turned pro.

russgray 14y ago

I remember my first home distro (outside of the university labs) was Definite Linux, in 2000. The installation CD came free with a magazine.

hollerith 14y ago

For a while in the 1990s, the leader of FreeBSD, Jordan Hubbard, was recommending people coming from Windows to choose Linux rather than BSD on the desktop. I do not recall his reasoning. Maybe something to do with better support for video cards.