[NBLUG/talk] 10 year anniversary Linux thread

Fri Jun 6 15:13:01 PDT 2008

Hey, thanks for the memories!  

I was first introduced to *NIX in colage, back in 1989-ish; yeah, I remember 4DOS, too and wished that any DOS was as powerful and fun as UNIX.  I think I started with Slack '96, I still have the book by the same title, came with the requisite CD, that shows the Linux "shark" mascot and remember installing it to some ancient hardware or another..486 VLB, I think.  While cleaning up the Shed, I recently came across the sleeve + my notes for a WalnutCreek CD...remember them?  *The* place to get slack or bsd cd's in the days of 14.4 dialup.  I think that CD (with some early Linux, I assume Slack) was the impetus to buy my first 2x CD drive...by '98 I was struggling to get Red Hat to run on a dual p3-866 box that had a Mylex SCSI controller (some full length monster with a 'massive' 4MB on board cache)...I think it was eventually traced to smp spinlock problems in the kernel that never did get fixed...that was about the time I started emailing David Hines, as I had resurected
 my first laptop...Funny, just about all of my earliest Linux memories revolve around hardware issues...now I usually stick to Ubuntu except for all those side projects of sqeezing tiny linux systems on to minimal hardware for one trick pony boxes...

Steve Johnson <srj at adnd.com> wrote: 10 years ago, I was running my own business that revolved around
Linux.  My business partner and my self started a small ISP in 1995,
and we used slackware linux for our radius, shell, email, and web
servers.

My first experience with *nix operating systems was in 1991, I had
gotten a job at a local computer store as their bench tech, and I
found out that their whole point of sales system was running on a
intel based unix box. This was a commercial version of Unix, I can't
recall what it was called.. Zenix? something like that..  It peaked my
interest.. I asked the boss for a copy of the program, and well he had
a fit about software piracy and basically said no way in hell..

So I wanted to learn unix, it intrigued me... After a while a customer
came in and told me about how he had access to the internet via a
company called CRL, so I signed up for $25 a month to get a unix
shell.. That pretty much got me started.. With in a month, I
discovered Linux.. I believe the distro was slackware, and I remeber
the version being .99 (I think that was the kernel version..)

My boss freaked, he could not believe that there was a FREE Unix OS
out there, and he actually accused me of stealing a copy of his OS (He
was an asshole.. he is also dead now.)

After running slackware on various different machines until about
1996, I finally switched to redhat Linux, which is where I stayed
until sometime in 2002ish I switched to Debian.. I pretty much stay
with Debian until Ubuntu came out, and that's what I use now.

-Steve

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 5:20 PM, Kyle Rankin  wrote:
> 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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> talk at nblug.org
> http://nblug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
>

-- 
"Knowing others is wisdom; Knowing the self is enlightenment;
Mastering others requires force; Mastering the self needs strength." -
Lao-Tzu

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