I was using Linux before things like Slackware came about, when it was just a boot and a root floppy disk. We had DECstation 3100/5000 machines costing small fortunes, that couldn’t reliably write a CD. The small 386 in the corner running “that newfangled thing” was far better at this :)<p>In my lifetime, I’ve gone through:<p>- building (as in: soldering chips to a motherboard) my own computer at home at age 11*<p>- buying an 8-bit Atari and learning about Antic and the 6502<p>- eventually getting a “disk drive” which stored an entire 128k<p>- moving onto a 32-bit cpu with the Atari ST<p>- blowing my student budget for the term on a hard disk, 20MB<p>- <i>finally</i> getting connected, at the blazing speed of 2048 baud<p>- lather, upgrade, rinse, repeat<p>- to where I have a 1gbit internet connection, a 10gbit home network, 100TB of storage locally, and a server rack in the garage with more than 100 “cores” available.<p>Things have changed so much, so quickly, relatively speaking.
The Linux kernel has been the greatest example of a global network of programmers contributing in the open and it has shown that open-source software with the GPL works for the contributors and for companies relying on Linux in production environments. I see most of the FAANG companies (Except Apple obviously) have at least contributed in some way, which is interesting to see.<p>For server-side environments or to some extent Android, I can see those as reasons for companies to contribute patches but I'm not sure for the future of several individual distros which are still floating around today, even when I rarely switch between macOS and Ubuntu these days..
I remember my first Linux distro, Monkey Linux, downloaded from the BBS. It fits on 5 floppy disks, with XFree86. You have to use `arj` to extract it, an alternative to `pkunzip` during that time.
(<a href="http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/monkey-6.0" rel="nofollow">http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/monk...</a>).<p>SuSE invented LiveCD, AFAIR, years before Knoppix claims to be the first LiveCD Linux in the late 90s.
We used Linux in a product before it had a network stack. We did need networking, and used KA9Q to do it. We also used rz / sz (zmodem protocol) for file transfer over phone lines. I recently integrated zmodem into an embedded system for firmware updates over a serial port- it's still very useful.<p>The performance of the floppy drive was terrible at first- a friend of mine and I added buffering, so that it could read a track at a time instead of block at time (which caused it to read only one block per disk rotation).<p>For the same project my friend created the generic SCSI driver that still exists today. It allowed us to connect a medical film scanner to Linux.
A lot of quality photos of old maps in one of the links: <a href="http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/sci/geo/carto/maakirjakartat/" rel="nofollow">http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/sci/geo/carto/maakirjakartat/</a><p>For example a book of old maps dated to 1643.
I thought of a fun exercise: Take the original Linux kernel, study it and slowly build upon it without looking at the current Linux kernel.<p>My thinking is that it could be quite interesting to see how different people evolve the kernel - maybe some interesting ideas result.
Ah, the memories of ordering distro bundles from cheapbytes and gleefully experimenting in my “test lab” (aka bedroom). It’s hard to quantify how liberating the early Linux days felt after a slow and painful indoctrination to computing in the Windows world.
One of the most interesting folder on Funet archive is mirror of Simtel[0] FTP-serever[1]: there are a lot of very interesting software for various old platforms.<p>Especially interesting — there are some very cool CAD, GIS and graphics apps or MS-DOS, Windows (from 3.1 to XP).[2]<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simtel" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simtel</a><p>[1] ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/Archived/simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/<p>[2] <a href="https://twitter.com/app4soft/status/1240002398577397772" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/app4soft/status/1240002398577397772</a>
Ah yeah, the good old days. Yggdrasil Linux, Turbo Linux, Slackware, etc. I think I installed my first Linux system in 1996 (maybe 1997) and never looked back. I didn't drop all use of OS/2 and Windows immediately, but by 2001 I had adopted Linux as my fulltime desktop OS and to this day it's all I use, outside of situations ($DAYJOB mostly) where I'm required to use something else.<p>I wonder if Linus had any idea of the impact his "toy project" would have on the world?
I remember buying "Linux - unleashing the workstation in your PC" circa '94 which had the tag line "friends don't let friends use DOS !". I was quite stunned at how much better it was than DOS/Windows at the time. I've been a Linux user ever since!
These specs, and runs over HTTP.. and is likely written in VIM, in unformatted HTML.<p>> It runs on a Linux server with dual 20 core processors, 786GB of memory and 80+TB of NetApp NFS storage.
> It has a 2 x 25Gbit/s connection to the Funet backbone.
Got my first copy of Linux (Debian Potato!) in early 2002. I'd known about it for years thanks to second-hand computer magazines and the excellent (in retrospect) ZDTV, and it definitely lived up to the hype.
This is cool. I remember my first distro was Mint like most. My story if curious: <a href="https://craignuzzo.tech/my-linux-life-journey/" rel="nofollow">https://craignuzzo.tech/my-linux-life-journey/</a>
what does 17.9.1991 mean? Can I suggest people stop coming up with their novel date formatting schemes and use a standard that universally makes sense? ISO 8601 is worth looking at:<p><a href="https://xkcd.com/1179/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1179/</a>