Well when Linux came out I was just annoyed that I hadn't been the one to do it. A friend of mine (the author of TinyMush) and I were certainly thinking about it at the time (I had embedded OS design experience, but none with virtual memory so maybe we would not have pulled it off). Also don't forget that the enabling technology was gcc and there was the example of Minix.<p>We did contribute to the floppy driver. The original driver read a block at a time before incurring a rotational latency. I had had enough of this slowness with SCO Xenix, so added a track buffer to speed it up on Linux. My friend wrote the original generic SCSI driver, to support a film scanner.<p>I think we may have made one of the earliest products using Linux. We worked for an entrepreneur who started a business selling medical image archiving and teleradiography equipment. In those days, ct-scan machines and MRI machines had no networking. To get images from them you had to capture the image sent to the console screen or use the 3M laser camera parallel interface. (My job was to make cards for this capturing). Image transfer was over phone lines using sz/rz and Telebit Trailblazer modems.<p>Anyway, at some point one machine did have network (I think it was some proprietary interface, not DICOM). The problem was that Linux did not yet have a networking stack. The solution? Use "KA9Q", the amateur radio TCP/IP stack in userspace for this.<p>At some point Pat Volkerding (Slackware) also worked with us. I remember he was a big deadhead at the time, wrote Slackware while living in parent's basement. We were half installing / half developing a teleradiography system after hours in Eastern Long Island Hospital.
I remember being introduced to Linux by our programming TA, who used to come at classes with the 'You need Python' t-shirt (it was early '00s for me). "So you don't need to reboot after installing a program?" - I was shocked. And in awe.<p>Then I jumped in the library and got myself a manual based on the UNIX 'System V R4' and am still amazed how 15 years later all commands still make sense (BTW, a link to the PDF copy of the SVR1 manual has passed here on HN a few days ago - I _so_ recommend it to anyone starting out[0]).<p>Dissatisfied with RedHat, Mandrake and SUSE I fell in love with the minimalist Slackware - that was my first true love, the one you will never forget.<p>Good memories, made of long nights recompiling the kernel, failing and wonder why nothing boots anymore, giggling when modprobing the module for the wireless device, and dreading leaving the home server up at nights with port 22 open (did I harden it enough?).<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052592" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052592</a>
Wow, that's a remarkably similar story to mine. Except I wound up with FreeBSD because of, well, Linus.<p>I had a very similar journey. For me, I got hooked on computers when my mom (a programmer at a defense contractor) would take me in to work when she didn't have a sitter. I got to hang out in the computer room and play adventure on the minicomputers they had in the late 70s. I had the typical Apple II experience many of us had in the early 80s. I learned to type by typing in those games from Byte (and how to debug by finding my typos), eventually writing my own games and learning 6502 assembly.<p>Flash forward to university and my first Unix account on an always-melting-down sparc server. There were dozens of DEC VT220 terminals in our public lab at UB in 1989, but only a few Xterminals which were highly coveted. My friends and I jumped at the chance to use them. Most of us eventually got on-campus jobs or internships with the goal of getting unfettered access to Sun or DECstation workstations. I <i>STILL</i> use some of the same keyboard shortcuts from my 1990 .twmrc, and my .cshrc, .Xdefaults and .emacs files have all just evolved from then (and yes, I still use tcsh).<p>The first time I installed Linux was from a stack of 3.5" floppies sometime in 1993 when I was a grad student at a different school. I was a huge Linux fan.<p>A year later, I met Linus at the '94 Linux BOF at the USENIX in Boston. At the time, I was trying to convince our dept to buy PCs rather than Suns or DECs to replace some wheezing grad student workstations. However, I ran into a problem where we used LaTeX, and it kept its fonts on a central NFS server (these were the days when disk space was precious, there were no package managers, and everything was installed by hand --- so installing stuff to NFS was very common). The 12MHz Mips R2000 DECstation 2100s we had (our slowest machines) would render a page of text in a second or two using xdvi. However, a test Linux machine (which was a blazingly fast 66MHz 486) would take 10x as long. I eventually figured out that this was because Linux NFS did not do any file caching at the time, and xdvi was seeking around byte by byte in the font files.<p>I was very excited to meet Linus, and was really looking forward to the USENIX BOF. So when I asked Linus about NFS file caching, he blew me off in what I now know is a typical Linus like fashion, and said he didn't care about NFS. So I went to the very friendly and welcoming FreeBSD BOF, found out that NFS works, and never looked back.
I discovered Slackware Linux in 1995's summer with 1.0.9 kernel, still using a.out format and first support for non SCSI CD-ROM drives. Had to use the installation from a MS-DOS partition.<p>Already knew Aix and Xenix back then, but having UNIX at home was great and I became a bit too much FOSS Zealot.<p>Nowadays I use all OSes and the Zealot guy has been replaced by a pragmatic guy that uses whatever makes sense for the business.
I remember the joy I felt when I downloaded Linux for the first time and booted it on my 386 .. it was like I was suddenly granted access to the hallowed halls of technology. I'd been a Unix guy for a decade before that, but never able to afford my own machine .. working with a Magnum pizzabox at work, but a lame DOS PC at home, it was always very frustrating to me. But when I got on the minix-list and saw Linus' post a few days later, I was instantly transported into an .. at the time .. elite new world.<p>Never looked back, and its amazing to me today to see just how far we've come. Truly a phenomenal technology ..
I was setting up one of those new fangled web sites at the software company for which I worked back in 1995. It was just two of us doing it in our spare time, with me doing the software side of things and a colleague looking after the hardware. He installed Slackware Linux on some hardware he had scavenged, and I installed Apache, Perl and (slightly later) MySQL. These choices weren't because we were visionaries or anything like that, but because we had zero budget and didn't know any alternatives.<p>The funny thing is, I remember a few years later going for interviews and being slightly bashful about our use of free software. But it was only after I subsequently got a job at a much bigger company using very expensive commercial software, which was an order of magnitude slower and mind bogglingly unreliable not to mention completely opaque, that I came to realise just how good some of the free software is.
Wow, that's quite a story, he clearly took it more seriously than I did. Mine is pretty simple, because I loved to tinker with OS's, and since everyone is sharing...<p>My local ISP gave away shell account I could telnet to and access a home directory that became a free website, ie theirispname.whatever/~myusername<p>I logged in, used HTML and Perl to do what I thought at the time to be the most amazing stuff in the world. Found out they used a variety of Linux as I sniffed around the commands available to me (like I had done with MS-DOS over the past couple years).<p>Thought it was awesome, and I ended up putting Slackware on a couple of my old systems people had donated to me and run little servers in my bedroom. Eventually went to RedHat, then CentOS, now mostly Ubuntu.<p>At the time I saved up for, and bought, any books that said "Linux" on them that came with CD's stuck to the back with a distro I could install :)
Being used to Sun workstations, and then DEC Alpha boxen, it was rather cool to be able to download and install a pretty complete Unix system on my PC at home in '93/'94.<p>No Internet at home though so I had to get multiple boxes of floppies from stores and download everything at work and then cycle home with them - I seem to remember X and its applications being the single largest chunk of stuff to install.
I remember being very chuffed with the fact that the boot and root disks (on 3.5" floppies) were physically smaller than my copy of "Portable Unix" [0]<p>Then a year or two later getting Dec$Write running on a V8650 to display on the X11 server of a Linux box elsewhere on the campus instead of one of the creaking DecStations we normally used.<p>Now I'm sitting in front of a laptop running Ubuntu and have an Android phone in my pocket. Good times (then and now).<p>[0] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Portable-UNIX-Douglas-W-Topham/dp/0471579262" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Portable-UNIX-Douglas-W-Topham/dp/0471...</a>
heh - in 1997-1999 I was replacing a novel network on token ring with a new IP net. I had some B2B EDI crap that needed to be scripted to deliver files from us to Sun...<p>I installed several linux servers and hired a couple contractors I knew to manage the deployment. They setup these linux boxes and consulted supporting them....<p>I went to one of them on day and said "you guys should just start a consulting company offering linux support!"<p>A few weeks later, one of my consultants came back and said "Hey guess what! We are starting a linux consulting company!"<p>I was excited... we talked briefly about me joining them, but that didnt work out...<p>A little later - they were valued at over $1B!<p>Those consultants that worked for me on this in 99? Dave Sifry, Art Tide and Chris DiBona.... They founded LinuxCare.<p>I later met Linus at one of the conferences and chatted with him for a bit, I don't recall him not being friendly though... but that was the only time I met with him.
I remember that in 1994-1995 Linux was a shock: you were able to run for free in your personal computer a system that did similar things to SCO Unix or Coherent (Unix clone) without the need of pirating it (students were used to pirate SCO Unix 20 1.44MB floppies using a special DOS copy program called "PC Trace" in order to copy non-DOS formatted disks, that "tradition" was lost because Linux was able to run using less space, and usually performing quite well on cheap hardware)
Even after all these years, sometimes something like this article makes me stop and think how awesome it is, and how fortunate I am to have had Linux and open source available. Having the freedom to learn about and tinker with <i>everything</i> is incredibly cool, and one reason I don't think I'll ever give up Linux as my OS for... pretty much everything.
Wow, I did exactly the same thing, sneaking around in labs, carrying floppies, saving pennies.<p>The only difference is that it was Duke Nukem on my floppies. I bet this guy has a better paying gig these days :/
Murdock mentions that he was studying management at the time he got into Linux. I couldn't find any further information about it. In Wikipedia it says that he studied computer science in Germany. At some point in life he changed majors.
I'd very much like to read a post about that decision.<p>I share the love of computers. I spend all my free time in front of computers, programming and reading. It's been like this for my whole life.
Due to a twist of fate (couldn't get a scholarship) I ended up in law school. I have no interest in anything beside computers. I can't live without them, but it's killing me to know that I can't study computer science.
Any suggestions??
Although my favorite free Unix-like is NetBSD, I have a great deal of admiration for what Debian does and how it does it. To me, it is one of the best Linux distibutions, along with Slackware and Arch.
For me it was visiting a friend who was using RH4 and seeing the stuff he was doing, I was already a computer geek and programming quite a lot so the idea of an open source operating system I could have the source code to was incredible.<p>I broke the family PC a whole bunch of times (software not hardware) before I managed to get linux onto and then onto the internet, after that nothing came close as a platform to work on and so it's nearly 20 years and I still run it to this day.
I was taking a Unix programming course in college and had a large enough programming project that it was a burden to try and program on the terminal through SSH or Telnet. Since I wasn't going to get Unix on my PC, I needed to find an alternative and remember hearing about Linux in the past. This was probably right around 2000.<p>I don't remember the reasons why, but I didn't download a distro and instead went to Staples and bought the cheapest flavor they had for sale. I can't remember what it was, but it had a GUI and text editor and all the backend programming stuff I needed to do the project much more efficiently.<p>I ended up keeping that Linux partition around and used it to teach myself Apache, MySQL, and PHP, which is what got me my first job our of college. That company was an Apple shop, so that's when I was first introduced to OSX and the need for a Linux desktop was eliminated for me.
I think it was Redhat Zoot (6.2) that was my first experience with Linux. It had linuxconfig installed by default (I desperately needed the assistance). The command line was so powerful over what Windows 95 had that I found it very intriguing. It seemed like MS Dos 6 but so much better!<p>The later versions had xEarth installed which is so cool.
I think my first encounter was as a CD attached to a magazine. Sadly someone had goofed and gotten a German variant of Slackware, as best i recall.<p>After that it was Suse and Mandrake in half-serious fashion.<p>Right now though i am using Gobolinux, after having it sit as a CD for a time until i had Windows blow up on me for the nth time.<p>I should really do a clean reinstall, as some major changes has come down the Linux pipeline since then. But at the same time, it basically works as it stands.<p>And in a telling expression of where Linux is heading, the guy that prepared the last iso for Gobolinux claims he spent more time getting the desktop parts (Consolekit, polkit, dbus, etc) working than the kernel etc.
I've started about 9 years ago, we have only one computer in home used also by my brother and father (diehard EE engineer that started with punched card programming and <i>still</i> writes, albeit great, software for embedded in notepad++(syntax coloring) and copy-paste into IAR IDE) and I was craving for linux but no one would allow me to install some strange OS. In 2006 I finally got <i>mine</i> first PC and I've installed ubuntu. I was enlightened so to speak, ubuntu worked for me for quite a while until gnome3 and unity, then I've switched to Arch and am using it ever since.
This is the first time that I read a background story of someone who feels similar to mine (which isn't to say it's a special story). I too got interested in girls and stopped with my computer hobby. I too started business school at first and eventually switched to computer science (started in 2010).<p>I always felt a bit out of place for having this origin story compared to 'normal computer science' students. I know it kind of sounds ridiculous, but it never stopped me from feeling it. Murdock's story really gave me the feeling that its just a silly thought I'm having :)
Could someone explain or link me to how revision control worked in the very early days of the Linux kernel? I'm aware of BitKeeper, Git et al. but interested in how things worked at its outset.
My encounter with Linux was somewhat similar but mostly from having enough with windoze. I had called a PC repair guru for the third time because of virus's on my windoze PC in 2007. He told me about a Linux but I was skeptical thinking it was more for the uber elite hackers. I tried out the Knoppix CD and then installed SuSE. I was hooked immediately. Much like the article writer's hook with being my own "superuser".<p>For those that haven't seen Revolution OS I would highly recommend it for much of the Linux backstory.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c</a>
I have used and installed linux many times. I have ubuntu on a dual boot on this computer. But linux on the desktop is going nowhere now that android is on the scene. Yeah, I understand that android is based on linux. But android is the big alternative man on campus now.