What was Linux like in the 90s
I really wish that I was born early so I've could witness the early years of Linux. What was it like being there when a kernel was released that would power multiple OSes and, best of all, for free?
I want know about everything: software, hardware, games, early community, etc.
Honestly, it sucked. Like most computing at the time. Everything came on a ton of floppy disks, it was impossible to update online unless you had a good connection (which nobody did), and you had to do everything by hand, including compiling a lot of stuff which took forever. I mean, I’m glad I got the experience, but I would never wanna go back to that. It sucked.
Remember when packages like RPM were first introduced, and it was like, “cool, I don’t have to compile everything!” Then you were introduced to Red Hat’s version of DLL-Hell when the RPM couldn’t find some obsure library! Before YUM, rpmfind.net was sooo useful!
Alrighty, old Linux user from the earliest of days.
It was fun, really great to have one-on-one with Linus when Lilo gave issues with the graphic card and the screen kept blank during booting.
It was new, few fellow students where interested, but the few that did, all have serious jobs in IT right know.
Probably the mindset and the drive to test out new stuff, combined with the power Linux gave.
OMG… BOFH! I need to go find those stories now :-)
The BOFH and his PFY are still helping their users...
Didn't expect to see a legend just scrolling here. Thank you for your contributions to computer science.
Clumsy. Manual. No multimedia support really. Compiling everything on 486 machines took hours.
Can't say I look back fondly on it.
BeOS community was fucking awesome though. That felt like the cutting edge at the time.
BeOS and NetBSD was were it was at for sure!!
I desperately wanted one of those first BeBoxes or whatever they were called. And one of those little SGI toasters… I even tried to compile SGI’s 3D file manager (demo) from Jurassic Park.
Herp derp… where can I download an OpenGL from… it keeps saying I can’t build it without one 🤤
I’m sure most are aware of this but, just incase anyone passing through is not… Haiku OS
Works great in a VM… fun to play with, have not tried bare metal / daily driving it though.
Yeah, I've tried it out. It's just years behind any Linux desktop right now though. The entire point of BeOS was to be a multimedia powerhouse, and it was. Everything else has surpassed it at this point though.
I can't remember much about it now, but I remember really wanting BeOS. I managed to get it installed once, but couldn't get the internet working, so ended up uninstalling it.
It wasn't too early, maybe 1997.
I was like 12 or so and I had just installed Linux.
I figured out, from the book I was working with, how to get my windows partition to automaticallyount at boot. Awesome!
I had not been able to figure out how to start "x" though.
So I rebooted into Windows, for on EFnet #linux, and asked around.
Got a command, wrote it down on a slip of paper, and rebooted into Linux.
I should mention, I also hadn't figured out about privileges, or at least why you wouldn't want to run around as root.
Anyway, I started typing in the command that I wrote down: rm -rf /.
I don't have to tell you all, that is not the correct command. The correct command was startx.
After I figured it was taking way too long, I decided to look up what the command does, and then immediately shut down the system.
It was far too late.
My pranks were less destructive ... /ctcp nick +++ath0+++ ... it was amazing how often that worked. 🤣
PRESS ALT+F4 for ops! 😂
OMG… the showmanship…
Someone-being-bratty-on-IRC: […] Me: We’re going to take away your internet access if you don’t behave. Bratty: Fuck you! You can’t do tha 5 minutes later… Bratty: How did you do that???
That’s terrible! They helped me fix my system when I decided I was fancy enough to try building a new version of gcc and go off-script a bit.
IIRC I deleted library.so rather that overwriting it. If I hadn’t been running IRC on another terminal already I would have been done for.
"Please insert Slackware disk Set A disk 3"
We had multiple fireproof boxes loaded with floppy backups...
All my homies who were into it were like “everything is free you just have to compile it yourself”
And I was like “sounds good but I cannot”
Then all the cool distros got mature and feature laden.
If you were a competent computer scientist it was rad.
If you were a dummy like me who just wanted to play star craft and doom you wasted a lot of time and ended up reinstalling windows.
I learned how to make a dual boot machine first.
My friend wanted to get me to install it, but he had a 2nd machine to run Windows on. So we figured out how to dual boot.
And then we learned how to fix windows boot issues 😮💨
We mostly did it for the challenge. Those Linux Magazine CDs with new distros and software were a monthly challenge of "How can I install this and also not destroy my ability to play Diablo?"
I definitely have lost at least one install to getting stuck in vim, flailing the keyboard and writing garbage data into a critical config file before rebooting.
Modern Linux is amazing in comparison, you can use it for essentially any task and it still has a capacity for customization that is astonishing.
The early days were interesting if you like getting lost in the terminal and figuring things out without a search engine. Lots of trial and error, finding documentation, reading documentation, etc.
It was interesting, but be glad you have access to modern Linux. There's more to explore, better documentation, and the capabilities that you can pull in are still astonishing.
I definitely have lost at least one install to getting stuck in vim, flailing the keyboard and writing garbage data into a critical config file before rebooting.
You spent a few evenings downloading a hundred or so 1.44MB floppy imges over a 56kbps modem. You then booted the installer off one of those floppies, selected what software you wanted installed and started feeding your machine the stack of floppies one by one.
Once that was complete you needed to install the Linux boot loader "LiLo" to allow you the boot it (or your other OS) at power on.
All of that would get you to the point where you had a text mode login prompt. To get anything more you needed to gather together a lot of detailed information about your hardware and start configuring software to tell it about it. For example, to get XFree86 running you needed to know
This level of detail was needed with every little thing
The advent of PCI and USB made things a lot better. Now things were discoverable, and software could auto-configure itself a lot of the time because there were standard ways to ask for information about what was connected.
You brought back traumatic memories I had successfully repressed.
Before modularized kernels became the standard I was constantly rerunning “make menuconfig” and recompiling to try different options, or more likely adding something critical back in :-D
I totally forgot about the shift to modules. What an upgrade!
You got it from a friend on a pile of slackware and floppies labeled various letters. It felt amazing and fresh, everything you could need was just a floppy away.
Then we got Gentoo and suddenly it was fun to wait 4 days to compile your kernel.
I remember my first Slackware installation from a pile of floppy disks!
I also remember that nothing worked after the installation, I had to figure out how to roll my own kernel and compile all the drivers. Kids today have it too easy.
shakes fist Now get offa ma lawn!
I tried compiling gentoo a bit later, upgraded from windows 95. Could never get to a login screen, I quit, and started using Linux later when it was easier to install
I remember I had over one hundred floppies to install it all. And those were just for the stuff I was interested in. This was circa 1996. I bought Red Hat 5.0 a year or so later. It came on 4 CD-ROM's and was cheaper than that pile of floppies had been.
If you wanted to run Unix, your main choices were workstations (Sun, Silicon Graphics, Apollo, IBM RS/6000), or servers (DEC, IBM) They all ran different flavors of BSD or System-V unix and weren't compatible with each other. Third-party software packages had to be ported and compiled for each one.
On x86 machines, you mainly had commercial SCO, Xenix, and Novell's UnixWare. Their main advantage was that they ran on slightly cheaper hardware (< $10K, instead of $30-50K), but they only worked on very specifically configured hardware.
Then along came Minix, which showed a clean non-AT&T version of Unix was doable. It was 16-bit, though, and mainly ended up as a learning tool. But it really goosed the idea of an open-source OS not beholden to System V. AT&T had sued BSD which scared off a lot of startup adoption and limited Unix to those with deep pockets. Once AT&T lost the case, things opened up.
Shortly after that Linux came out. It ran on 32-bit 386es, was a clean-room build, and fully open source, so AT&T couldn't lay claim to it. FSF was also working on their own open-source version of unix called GNU Hurd, but Linux caught fire and that was that.
The thing about running on PCs was that there were so many variations on hardware (disk controllers, display cards, sound cards, networking boards, even serial interfaces).
Windows was trying to corral all this crazy variety into a uniform driver interface, but you still needed a custom driver, delivered on a floppy, that you had to install after mounting the board. And if the driver didn't match your DOS or Windows OS version, tough luck.
Along came Linux, eventually having a way to support pluggable device drivers. I remember having to rebuild the OS from scratch with every little change. Eventually, a lot of settings moved into config files instead of #defines (which would require a rebuild). And once there was dynamic library loading, you didn't even have to reboot to update drivers.
The number of people who would write and post up device drivers just exploded, so you could put together a decent machine with cheaper, commodity components. Some enlightened hardware vendors started releasing with both Windows and Linux drivers (I had friends who made a good living writing those Linux drivers).
Later, with Apache web server and databases like MySql and Postgres, Linux started getting adopted in data centers. But on the desktop, it was mostly for people comfortable in terminal. X was ported, but it wasn't until RedHat came around that I remember doing much with UIs. And those looked pretty janky compared to what you saw on NeXTStep or SGI.
Eventually, people got Linux working on brand name hardware like Dell and HPs, so you didn't have to learn how to assemble PCs from scratch. But Microsoft tied these vendors so if you bought their hardware, you also had to pay for a copy of Windows, even if you didn't want to run it. It took a government case against Microsoft before hardware makers were allowed to offer systems with Linux preloaded and without the Windows tax. That's when things really took off.
It's been amazing watching things grow, and software like LibreOffice, Wayland, and SNAP help move things into the mainstream. If it wasn't for Linux virtualization, we wouldn't have cloud computing. And now, with Steam Deck, you have a new generation of people learning about Linux.
PS, this is all from memory. If I got any of it wrong, hopefully somebody will correct it.
That's great bit of history
It may be useful for people reading if you could add headers about when each decade starts, since you have many of them there
Contrary to other OSes, the information about it was mainly on the internet, no books or magazines. With only one computer at most homes, and no other internet-connected devices, that posed a problem when something didn't work.
It took me weeks to write a working X11 config on my computer, finding all the hsync/vsync values that worked by rebooting back and forth. And the result was very underwhelming, just a terminal in an immovable window. I think I figured out how to install a window manager but lost all patience before getting to a working DE. Days and days of fiddling and learning.
Lol! 'Member Afterstep?
The desktop stretched across 4 screens was enough to hook me for life.
Xeyes.. so many terminals.. the artwork was artwork.. wtf is transparency?! 😁 It was an amazing time to be a geek.
I didn't get that far. And I only had an Amiga at that time, which made things more difficult to set up. I wonder how fluent transparency would be with AGA, haha. My next attempt was woth a PC around 2003 with KDE3 and it got me hooked.
Speaking of books, my only experience with Linux in the 90s was seeing the Red Hat books. I don't know anyone who actually made it work.
I started using Linux right in the late 90’s. The small things I recall that might be amusing.
<I think I still have an old book that cautioned if you configured your refresh rates and monitor settings incorrectly your monitor could catch on fire.> Are you telling me that one dev for X.org could set someone's monitor on fire by fucking with four lines of code?
Jesus Christ, thanks for that, I didn't need to sleep tonight.
Monitors don't work like that anymore. The ones that could catch on fire are pretty much all in the landfills by now.
I don’t recall doing any regular updates
You needed to buy a modem to get online
If you stay offline, you don't need upgrading to prevent virus or hacking. That's the norm in the good old days.
It was S.u.S.E. Linux 5.3
Great manual.
I was lucky that my NIC, graphics and sound card were supported out of the box.
But everything was still much worse than on Windows.
But I could taste the freedom.
Now all my devices run on Linux (except my Nintendo Switch).
Yeah those manuals were great i still have mine.
The danger of poorly configuring your XF86Config in a way that could irreparably damage your giant CRT monitor was thrilling.
XFree86 was such a tacky name
I got a very early version of Debian from a friend when I was in college. I had a very old computer gifted to me but couldn't get Windows to install. I ran that badboy with no window manager, just text. I used elinks for my web browser and pine for email. VI was where I wrote my papers. Drivers were a problem, so I had to save papers on a disk to print from a computer at a library.
winmodems and modelines were problematic but it was liberating to be able to tinker.
and walnut creek was doing the Lord's work.
Walnut Creek and infomagic saved me so much headache. Can't beat the bandwidth of a FedEx truck, especially when you're 28.8 at home.
I remember the name Walnut Creek, but I don't remember why. Did they ship the Slackware CDs? I had a couple of full sets of those, but ultimately decided that Linux needed to mature before I'd mess with it. By 2003 it had gotten there.
It was real real rough
Imagine gnome but instead of deciding your settings for you, they had a dialog where you had to pick the settings yourself.
And you needed to find out the scanlines of your monitor before X would even display anything, and then that was a black and white grid. Then you needed to spent another day or two getting a window manager working.
Oh god, was there even a maximize button so you could maximize your windows?
There was but noone knew what to do with it. We were all universally confused for like a solid 25 years.
What did maximum even mean when you have a “virtual desktop” that was 4x times the size of your actual display. Because that is the kind of nonsense we used to do on Linux (because you you could and the other guys could not).
Spent a week getting the audio driver to work so I could finally figure out how to properly pronounce “Linux…” and I still couldn’t.
Spent like $50 on floppy disks and like 2 days labeling them by hand before printing out the 20 pages of instructions, formatting my hard drive and installing Slackware. Realized I didn’t actually know any unix commands. Paged a friend.
Relevant xkcd's
I don't think this paints a bleak enough picture of Linux before 2010 or so tbh, but it's a good start.
I got tired of compiling the kernel taking a day on my Pentium pc. So I got a pile of 486s the uni was throwing out, built a Beowulf cluster out of them and soon I was able to compile the kernel in two and half days.
In the 90s, it was hard :-)
It made sense to recompile the kernel to make it fit your hardware.
It was a mess to find peripherals that were working with Linux.
I built soooo many kernels. 😅
Prior to the website rpmfind.net, installing software was to put it mildly, a chore. Due to package dependency, you'd start the compile, and it would fail due to missing libraries. You'd then go out and find those libraries, only to have them fail on compile...due to missing libraries...it would go on like until you finally were able to compile the original package - at this point though you compiled it out of sheer spite for the universe that put you in that position.
I rate the experience a solid 5/7
it was garbage.
servers already worked well for the time, but desktop was rough.
I tried to use Slackware in the mid 90s. After two solid days trying to get my ppp dialup connection to come up after a reboot - it would come up in the first boot after install, run for days like that, but after any reboot it was dead and gone and nobody on the internet seemed to know how to deal with it. "Real men" didn't use dialup, and people on dialup (self included) had no clue.
I declared it "not ready for prime time" due to that, and issues with sound drivers, and ignored it until 2003. In 2003 I tried some Cygwin and was impressed with its performance, so very close to "bare metal" Ubuntu. In 2004-5 the 64 bit AMD chips were coming out and I used Gentoo to build a true 64 bit system addressing 8GB of RAM - there wasn't really any other option.
I got tired of compiling every little part of the system from source for days on end and migrated to various flavors of Ubuntu / Debian, which by 2006-7 was becoming a viable desktop alternative. Before that you ALWAYS had to have a Windows machine for something, usually several somethings. At this point I only use my company issued Windows laptop when I need to connect to the company VPN, which can be months between needs depending on what I'm doing. My wife and I use Ubuntu full time now.
You had to really want it, but once you got it, it was more than worth it.
you also had to have precisely the right hardware.
I had an old laptop, and my WiFi required some kind of cutter driver that wrapped broadcom, my Intel graphics didn't work on newer kernels. It booted in 7 seconds on a 5400rpm disk though while XP took minutes.
Wifi? imagine trying to get pci modems working and basically compiling your kernel each time you’d need an obscure driver. usb didn’t even exist and external ones were both expensive af and running on serial ports.
good times honestly. I learned so much about linux.
NDIS wrapper. I hated that so much, I bought a natively supported PCMCIA card.
The only OS that was solid as a desktop OS back then, with good usability, was BeOS. Both MacOS and Windows had stability problems (although NT/2000 were much better, but lacked app/game compatibility), and Linux was a nightmare to update and run (lots of compiling too). So the OS of choice back then for me, was BeOS. I could do everything I needed with it too.
The absolute best thing about it was that after suffering under Microsoft's shitty operating systems for years, you were running a Unix-like on your own hardware. That part was amazing.
Having grown up with Acorn Atoms. BBC Micro, MS and DRDOS, Gem, Xerox something, Windows 1, don't remember 2, 3.0 to 3.11, NT. I didn't realise how nice early (2004) Linux was until I used it in a Windows server hosted VM to handle my phone calls (VoIP@home or something it was called).
I did everything I could to ditch Windows after that. The webification of QuickBooks was the final release.
Linux was getting pretty nice by 2004. In 1996 it was a LOT rougher.
I basically left Windows in 2006 and never looked back. I did some cross platform work in Qt where I'd develop in either iOS or Linux and then hand the product over to the test team to compile in Windows - worked beautifully. Sure, there were things that worked in one OS that wouldn't work in one or both of the alternatives, but when I figured out the problem it was 90%+ me "getting away with" bad practice on my development machine that once cleaned up ran everywhere just fine.
These days the Browser is 99% of the OS that means anything to anybody.
I spent what felt like many moons trying to compile Gentoo when I was a kid. There was only the wiki and a gritty forum for getting answers, nothing in real-time. I didn't have very much knowledge of the kernel or messing with modules, and was certainly lost on getting a desktop environment going even after I got past the kernel part.
It was such an experience, I decided to become a janitor.
Gentoo got pretty well defined / easy to compile by 2004 - I managed to get a 64 bit system built and working after a couple of tries, each try taking multiple days of course.
stacks of diskettes, for every operating system.
would routinely spend hours doing an install only to hit a block and have to reinstall DOS to have modem access to get help on usenet. Then hours of reinstalling to move forward and repeat on another issue.
I really loved it though, it was a massive upgrade over DOS and windows on a 286.
I didn't have a Pentium processor in my computer, the internet was young, information wasn't as ready or available, and the mindset wasn't that you could check everything. I don't remember how many floppy disks it took to install Slackware, but at least one read error was definitely on the way. I had a 56k modem at home, so I had printed out the installation instructions from work. Compiling everything wasn't a problem, because I learned to code back in 1983. When I tried to figure out the refresh rate of my screen, I was afraid I would blow it up and go blind. The feeling of freedom was when you were the one who could choose everything for the first time in your virtual life.
The first time I ever used Linux was in high school around 2001-2002. I don’t remember what the distro was but it had drawing issues, clearly some kind of driver issue that I couldn’t figure out, on my PC so I switched back to Windows 98SE.
Not what op asked for, but it kept away from Linux at home until 2007. I started using Linux regularly in university around 2004.
I had the same issue with Red Hat 6.1 on a cheap PC. One of the reasons I love using Arch is it gives me the nostral of those days.
I started using it before distros were really a thing. I got as far as having something that would boot to a shell, but then since I was 14 I had no idea what I was supposed to do.
Backed off until I bought a Slackware book that came with a CD. Then I had the fun of trying to get X working. Manually entering frequencies for your monitor was scary, because if you got it wrong you could damage the monitor.
Then I had a fun problem of either my modem would work, or my sound card would work, but never both at the same time.
Honestly I never got a system which I could actually use for anything, but I was a kid having fun, and it taught me to not be afraid of the computer.
Games: xbill, koules, and quake1 prerelease test(8 or 16 player multi)
Crafting XFree86 config lines to get a monitor working(no auto-detect for resolution modes)
Sharing tips, on how to solve all these issues, with others at Linux User Groups(LUGs)
Imagine a pile of floppy disks, with stuffs inscribed on it that you never heard of....
... will you insert one into your computer and reboot it?
friend told me "ah you like hacking at DOS and stuffs, you may be interested in that, it's called 'linouqse' i guess..." so i gave it a shot.
"Slackware"... it was something like kernel 1.3.12 or 1.3.13 i am not sure... it came on 6 or 7 floppy disks.
from the boot already it seemed like nothing i had seen before: all (!) hardware seemed to be methodically enumerated, a bunch of esoteric commands and processed started their bizarre dance before my very eyes. looked already like i was accessing so much more information about the insides of my -then beloved- machine than ever?! this flashes very fast though and is a bit frustrating... then a rudimentary install menu, in text mode, asking a lot of questions.
.... trying all of this and failing many times, getting an old hard disk in a secondary bay to dedicate to the exercise... getting to it again and again (there was no Internet, where i was, then)... until finally, the thing boots up. a login prompt. i had remembered the password chosen upon install, that was it!
... a shell? i had never heard of Unix before, 100% of my previous practice before was with micro-computing, from 8bit to 16bit to DOS PC and its laughable Windows 3.1 (tm)...
...... what am i gonna do with all this, now?!
[fiddling...]
[months passed]
... "xf86something"....? what? some more configuration? some more esoteric? Where does that lead me? wait.
..... a graphical environment just popped out of my console?! with windows and shits?!!? this was there since the very beginning, like it was already there this whole time?!?!
🤯
Later on erring back on the side of Win3.1 because its "trumpet winsock" was the obvious, "easy" way to get connected to this new eldorado that opened up around (the year was 1995)... reading more about it on this new "online" helped me figure how to get back on that cool and hacky side, to finally (after months?) get the modem to connect, through PPP, to my ISP....
This is when I decided it would be cool, someday, to make this my primary OS, and that i'll work towards this end from now on. at the same time i heard for the first time of "free(libre) software" and that thing resonated within me as something i didn't know was possible: a way to organize society, based on virtuous principles of sharing knowledge and helping one's neighbor, through the same playful excitement of hacking that had kept me on my toes since i was a child? where do I sign?!
3 years later i decided to never boot a Windows OS again, and here I am, ranting on lemmy like i am 275 years old.......
oh yeah that, and compiling your kernel! Felt like opening an old spell book or something....
On the topic, did AOL work on linux? They were the google of their time, i can't imagine the FOSS world thought very highly of them
Looking through music and budget software CDs at a computer store or a college vendor table, there would be one with a penguin or BSD mascot. It wasn't like the other discs that had DOS shareware games or utilities. The CD rom drives were 1x speed, attached to a card on the ISA bus, without plug and play, so it needed an interrupt number that didn't collide with other cards. The install process was curses based, with no mouse. There would be much time spent figuring out how to partition the drive, usually after buying a book. Back then, computer book sections were huge. The software install dialog had one line description per package, and it wasn't easy to tell what they did. Then there was setting up X Server and choosing a window manager. Not all video modes were supported, so it took a lot of trial and error with editing config files and resolutions before the the window environment would work. This was before home internet so it would take a weekend or all week to figure out. The only accessible communities in many parts were dialup bulletin boards, unless there was access to a college computer lab with a mosaic or netscape browser. At this point it was realized that I lived in a tech desert, quit my retail job, and moved.
The days before Walnut Creak CD-ROM :-) Waiting for FIDO.NET to be synced at midnight… I think that’s what it was called… shit’s getting hazy.
Had to google, here's wikipedia links for those not in the know!
We didn't have -R, you had to go into every subdirectory and run the command manually.
My first experience was with two floppy images I found on "So much shareware! Vol.2".
It was labeled Linux 0.99b, no distro. It was not of much use to me at the time.
A couple of years later I got my hands on Slackware 2.0 on CD. So much time spent compiling your own kernel, because no modules and the whole thing had to fit in main memory (640kB). So much time spent fiddling with xf86config hoping you wouldn't fry your CRT.
Good times.
Then came gentoo, which had package management. No more did you have to browse sourceforge for endless dependencies to install something. No more did you have to re-install slackware on your root partition to update. So user-friendly in comparison.
We spent a lot of time on IRC.
MUDs kind of bridged the gap between IRC and games.
I remember spending a lot of time playing abuse, snes9x, quake + team fortress and quake2 + action quake.
Hmm my first linux distro was Suse 5.x that came on 5 CDs (i think it was 1998) ... can't say I used it much, I had weird German ISDN Internet at the time and the PPPoverWhatever (forgot the exact name) just didn't wanna work. Making music wasn't really feasible at the time. It mostly lay dormant. I slowly climbed the learning curve and switched to Linux full-time in the mid-2000s, when a lot more things were possible ...
There was a similar question a while ago with some nice reads in the answers :)
Linux was exciting but time consuming and not all that useful.
I used to bike into University, spend half the night downloading disk images of SLS, spend hours more installing, and spend hours more getting the X config timings working for my monitor. But when I was finally able to use the same window manager config as the Sun workstations at school I felt like King of the World! But what was I actually doing with it? Xterm and an ancient version of GCC.
That said, I created my own basic Shell in the early days and a few little utilities. So I learned a lot. I do not think I would even have attempted many things without the technical confidence that just being a Linux user brought. There was the feeling that you could do anything even though you were hardly doing anything. And new capabilities were constantly arriving so that feeling lasted years.
Hard
94-95 school year for me. Prior to win 95. Honestly OS2 warp was the tits then, blew windows and linux away. But the cool thing about linux was that you could pull a session from the college mainframe and then run all the software off campus. Over a modem. Pro E, maple, matlab, gopher, Netscape, ftp/fsp, irc, on and on. Once you had X going on your 486, you were good to go.
But honestly, it was nerd sh$t. Dos was king until win95. And then nobody looked back until win8 made us realize Microsoft had started sucking.
I started programming in DOS professionally in January 1991. It was pretty clear how bad Microsoft sucked by February of 1991, and blindingly obvious when they "updated" DOS more than annually with "95% backward compatibility" which translated to: "we just broke all your programs and you're only going to have to figure out which 5% of your code you're going to have to update to make it work in this version - aaaaand, by the time you do that we will be releasing a newer version! ;-P "
Something called DrDOS came along and we used it just because it wasn't updating and breaking backward compatibility so often. Since 640k wasn't enough for us even then, we ended up putting the kludge "Phar-Lap 32 bit extender" libraries on our product so we could access all the cheap RAM that systems were being shipped with (2MB was pretty much standard by 1992).
Then there was the day that McAffee decided that our product's main .exe was a virus. It wasn't. It wasn't infected with anything. It didn't do anything vaguely resembling malware. McAffee just had a false positive pattern match with our software.
The Microsoft treadmill was a very real thing all through the 1990s - much like Android and iOS are today. Sure, you've got a cool idea for an app, but we're going to keep shifting the OS underneath you so that you're spending 90%+ of your time just recoding your same old app for the latest OS release. That way you don't have any time to innovate and maybe threaten our business model.
Yeah, I jumped ship right around the time Win8 came out. 14.04 was an interesting time to start learning. I was obsessed with trimming out bloat, so I used a tool to uninstall orphaned packages. Problem was, it also deleted some dependencies for GNOME.
I had, to quote the most helpful and humorous person in an Ubuntu forum post, "borked it so bad it had to be nuked from orbit."
I have since learned my lesson and learned to be a little bit more careful with the magical responsibilities of sudo.
I have turned to scripting all of my desktop mods and keeping them in a git repo. So, when I nuke a system from orbit all I have to do is install fresh, add git, check out my repo and run the scripts.
win8 made us realize
Bruh you were late. Vista sucked, 7 sucked, they were shit since XP. Sure, I kept using it until 10 because I was afraid linux still didn't work, but XP was the last time I was happy with computers until I installed Fedora.
Nah, 7 was pretty good, although it was the last good one.
Anything past that was garbage but frankly I tolerated it as as a teenager I was too busy being horny all the time to notice how my computer was increasingly antagonistic towards me.
I tolerated all the way to windows 10 but windows 11 was the last nail in the coffin for me. I probably am indeed late to the party but tbh Linux didn't inspire me until recently when I saw its became way more user-friendly than it was in 2015 when I first tried it.
LI
Stuff needed tweaking more wine worked almost never even for basically window's programs. Configuring Xfree86 was black magic. Running Startx at the terminal prompt was like rolling the dice. Distro choice was smaller and it was really a choice. Since the child distros were less of a thing. You had Debian , Redhat, Slackware, and SUSE. All were very different at a fundamental level with packaging and philosophy. Also it was way more common to buy boxed copies of Linux distros with big thick manuals that helped you get it installed and take your first steps with Linux. It reminded me of when I first got my TI 83 calculator an it had that massive manual with it.
Also Lugs and spending a lot of time on IRC getting and helping people on freenode (don't go there now) was a must.
First time I format the whole disk, all msdos data (games) lost. I managed to install it then I opened vim to edit a file and I couldn't get out of vim I know it's a cliche, but there is real. To get out I have to call a friend, using the landline, the one who lends me the floppy disks (or maybe it was magazine cd) and ask he how to get out, he says, just press Shift and Z twice.
My first time trying out Linux was with a bootable CD from a PC gaming magazine. It was Corel Linux. If I recall correctly it booted into KDE.
Unfortunately on my system the mouse cursor was invisible. The mouse worked, I just couldn't see where the cursor was. My brother who was using Linux full time couldn't help me fix it.
Well, in the 90's I managed to essentially brick two NIC's by tinkering with the tulip driver on command line. In the distro I used it had to be done manually and I still have no idea as to what happened inside those NIC's, but they sure didn't work ever again. Yes, I made the same mistake twice.
I was just looking through old books and noticing my Yggdrasil manual the other day. That was one of the earliest plug and go cd-rom distributions. Before that was e.g. Slackware and the early Debian, both of which involved big piles of floppies. I also remember sending Linus an email and getting an answer. I'm sure he is too much of a busy celebrity for that now.
I mean, you could recreate it. Just burn some old distros on a cd and get one of tgese old white pc
I remember building the kernel with the NE2000 drivers and having a network card for just installation and getting the 3com or RTL driver source over to the new install, then compiling those drivers, installing them, and downing the system to put the proper card in. There was a very small subset of sound cards and video cards that worked reliably. The notion that Linux was the OS where hardware just worked out of the box was ludicrous.
The DEs were pretty horrible and the software to use on them was scant. So desktop Linux was a pipe dream. I used Linux entirely as a security/server appliance. I built a couple hundred iptable/ipchains firewalls for businesses out of recycled pentium type desktops until hardware firewalls became a thing, it was fairly lucrative for a while there.
In the late 90s you could get CDROMs from the nerds at university with everything you need on them. If you got your sound card working and could play an mp3, you felt like a master hacker who had beat the game.
Reading how-tos(may be the source code too) are all you needed. No need to listen random stuff from some random YouTubers. Ppl can read that time. Books and magazines did exist.
How many times did I read the condescending "HOW-TO sound drivers" with it's condescending opening of "If you must hear biff bark" and it's virtually always unhelpful content. Maybe one install in 10 would benefit from the pearls of Linux Audio wisdom contained therein, and it was the best available source for YEARS.
I loved reading HOWTOs, they were a bit like scene zines, but the content wasn't that helpful indeed
LUGs were very important back then especially when you were new.
I started using Slackware in the late 90s - say 1998. I used it for most of my desktop applications pretty much right away.
I don't game much so that wasn't an issue for me.
It was definitely harder to configure. I recompiled so many kernels and told myself the speed boost from getting exactly what I needed and nothing else was impressive. It wasn't.
I dunno. It wasn't as polished as it is now, and was harder to configure, but it was still very good, and once you got it configured, it kept working, unlike the more popular os of the day.
Well, I was an Amiga user. That was already unix-like, preemptive multitasking, etc. It was fading fast in the early nineties, and while i was already working in I.T., I was not interrsted in using Windows 3.11 and 95, so I began playing with Slackware Linux. I figured it was a good way to get comfortable with "real" I.T..
I learned Bash and had to compile most of the software i wanted to try. Since, like all programmers, I'm lazy, I wrote some simple scripts to build the code and make them into packages (tgz) for Slackware. This took tedium out of the work, and i could use the packkage manager to install and remove them.
Those were rough days for desktop users, though. I really had to use windows when i needed to pass output to "normies". I tried several window manager and desktops, and eventually landed on Ubuntu.
Well, I was an Amiga user.
Based. But on a serious note, what machine did you have/use? Could you install Linux on the classic Amiga machines? I've always thought about buying an Amiga 1200.
https://www.debian.org/ports/m68k/ has a nice little intro and the key requirements.
MMU and HD space were the biggest issues. One of those has pretty much gone away with time.
A stock Amiga 1200 wouldn't allow you to run Linux, because the CPU doesn't have an MMU (memory management unit). With a turbo card installed with at least a 68030 and enough RAM you could run Linux on a 1200 though.
Back in my day we had to get our Internet at the village Internet well. I remember the dialup modem noises it made as you pulled the bucket up.