[NBLUG/talk] 10 year anniversary Linux thread

Kyle Rankin kyle at nblug.org
Mon Jun 2 17:20:24 PDT 2008


Hi NBLUG,

In honor of our upcoming 10 year anniversary, I thought it would be
interesting to create a thread where those of us who have been using Linux
that long and especially anyone who was at NBLUG the first year could
reminisce a bit about Linux back then, and the group itself back then.

I'll start. I wasn't at NBLUG in 1998  (or even in the state), so I'll just
start with what Linux was like for me back then. I started using Linux back
in the beginning of 1998 with Redhat 5.1. A buddy at college helped me
through the floppy install and eventually I had an fvwm95 desktop complete
with the start menu so I could launch, well, mostly terminals, licq, and
xbill at the time. Oh and Netscape Navigator 4. I can't remember what exact
Netscape version it was, but I do remember that it took me a while to get
java to work.

I think at the time the main things that appealed to me about Linux was the
availability of all the source for these applications. I was beginning CS
at the time so the concept of actually seeing and modifying any program I
wanted was amazing to me. Plus at the time we could either do development
on the campus HP-UX servers (some of us used Visual C++ if we had it
instead), so the idea of having a free development environment that closely
mimicked the campus servers was pretty cool. I guess I must admit that it
seemed pretty cool to be running this strange OS that few average people
had heard about and that was pretty secure and stable compared to my
Windows 95 desktop.  Winnuke was popular around that time and it was fun to
chat with people who tried to attack you, but couldn't.

So, how about the rest of you 10yr+ Linux users?

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org



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