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.

  • hobbsc@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    7·
    59 minutes ago

    winmodems and modelines were problematic but it was liberating to be able to tinker.

    and walnut creek was doing the Lord’s work.

    • bajabound@lemmy.world
      1·
      9 minutes ago

      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.

  • Beej Jorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org
    2·
    28 minutes ago

    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.

  • callmemagnus@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 hours ago

    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.

  • 52fighters@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    8·
    3 hours ago

    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.

  • WhatsHerBucket@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 hour ago

    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.

  • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
    25·
    4 hours ago

    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.

    • sramder@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      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.

    • Joe@discuss.tchncs.de
      8·
      3 hours ago

      My pranks were less destructive … /ctcp nick +++ath0+++ … it was amazing how often that worked. 🤣

      • sramder@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 hours ago

        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???
      • StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        2·
        2 hours ago

        Thats a new one on me. What did that do if I may ask? Best I have been able to figure out is that it’s probably IRC related but that’s it.

        • dan@upvote.au
          7·
          2 hours ago

          +++ath0 is a command that tells a dial up modem to disconnect. I’ve never seen it used in IRC this way, but my guess is that the modem would see this coming from the computer and disconnect.

          This was back in the days when everything was unencrypted.

  • floo@retrolemmy.comEnglish
    483·
    4 hours ago

    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.

    • d00phy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      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!

    • TFO Winder@lemmy.ml
      161·
      4 hours ago

      Remember the slow internet jad to wait overnight for 40 megabyte game and finally finding out it didn’t work.

  • azron@lemmy.ml
    111·
    4 hours ago

    The danger of poorly configuring your XF86Config in a way that could irreparably damage your giant CRT monitor was thrilling.

  • Joe Bidet@lemmy.ml
    41·
    3 hours ago

    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?

    • Joe Bidet@lemmy.ml
      101·
      2 hours ago

      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 ™…

      … 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…

      • Joe Bidet@lemmy.ml
        5·
        2 hours ago

        oh yeah that, and compiling your kernel! Felt like opening an old spell book or something…

  • chargen@lemmy.ca
    21·
    5 hours ago

    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

  • BOFH666@lemmy.world
    33·
    5 hours ago

    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.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    301·
    5 hours ago

    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.

    • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      18 minutes ago

      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.

    • sramder@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 hours ago

      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 🤤

  • PunkRockSportsFan@fanaticus.socialEnglish
    22·
    5 hours ago

    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.

    • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
      81·
      4 hours ago

      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.