[TriEmbed] Linux beginning

[jonathan hunsberger]

It's crazy how easy it is to lose little bits of information like when you
first started using Linux. Looking at some mail archives i know for sure i
was using as my "daily driver" at home by 1998, and at work by 1999.  I
used the early versions of Caldera Open Linux, and then later regretted it
when they became SCO and started the whole Linux patent lawsuit thing.
Even with a distribution like that it was still necessary to recompile
kernels, etc.  Getting it to work on any given hardware was an adventure.
I had one PC where i could not get it working.  It would hang very early in
the boot sequence.  I tried other OS like FreeBSD and OpenBSD and they did
the same thing.  The only thing that would boot on it was Windows (95).  I
finally gave up on it, and figured there must have been some kind of
firmware bug fixed or worked-around in the Windows boot, but maybe that was
naive of me.

It was funny back in those days because friends and family knew i worked in
IT and tried to ask me about their Windows problems.  I would give it my
best go and sometimes could figure it out but it was from general
principles and ingenuity rather than experience since all day i was doing
UNIX support from a Linux laptop.

Interestingly, i also remember (though can't pin it in time, other than
early 2000s) making the decision to switch back to Windows (XP) at work.  I
was doing most of my work remotely in ssh sessions and decided to take
advantage of the standard work distribution rather than continually
fighting with all the nonstandard (for the company) software, like MS
Office docs not looking exactly right in OpenOffice, or dealing with
Windows in VMWare, With a few exceptions i have pretty much continued that
pattern (even at home now) with Windows on the desktop and Linux servers on
the network (or local VMs, or now WSL) to do the real work.

On Sat, Apr 15, 2023 at 11:07 AM Pete soper via TriEmbed <
triembed at triembed.org> wrote:

> For me it was 1993 using Slackware with a .91 kernel. A bazillion floppies
> (or maybe 35) as Brad said. Had to customize/rebuild the kernel a lot.
> Making uucp work was my first goal as I recall. This was on a 40MHz AMD
> 386. Printing was an additional adventure, and sound another one. I
> eventually learned to go with the flow so when it came time to use ethernet
> I simply bought one of the blessed cards and followed somebody's cookbook
> and so that was mercifully straight forward.
>
> But at the time at work I had hardware coming out of my ears. My main
> (Encore) machine had four 50Mhz Motorola 88110 processors running BSD Unix.
> So, much like Lars (fantastic dry humor) put it, I mostly used the home
> Linux system to access usenet with uucp. :-)
>
> Pete
> On 4/15/23 01:32, Robert Mackie wrote:
>
> Wow, that's cool to read.  When did folks on this list first use Linux?
> Just kind of curious since this is the kind of crowd that might have been
> early adopters.
>
> Rob.
>
> On Fri, Apr 14, 2023 at 7:06 PM Peter Soper via TriEmbed <
> triembed at triembed.org> wrote:
>
>> The early days of Linux -
>> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/928581/841b747332791ac4/
>>
>> Pete
>> _______________________________________________
>> Triangle, NC Embedded Interest Group mailing list
>>
>> To post message: TriEmbed at triembed.org
>> List info:
>> http://mail.triembed.org/mailman/listinfo/triembed_triembed.org
>> TriEmbed web site: https://TriEmbed.org
>> To unsubscribe, click link and send a blank message: mailto:
>> unsubscribe-TriEmbed at bitser.net?subject=unsubscribe
>> Searchable email archive available at
>> https://www.mail-archive.com/triembed@triembed.org/
>>
>> _______________________________________________
> Triangle, NC Embedded Interest Group mailing list
>
> To post message: TriEmbed at triembed.org
> List info: http://mail.triembed.org/mailman/listinfo/triembed_triembed.org
> TriEmbed web site: https://TriEmbed.org
> To unsubscribe, click link and send a blank message: mailto:
> unsubscribe-TriEmbed at bitser.net?subject=unsubscribe
> Searchable email archive available at
> https://www.mail-archive.com/triembed@triembed.org/
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.triembed.org/pipermail/triembed_triembed.org/attachments/20230415/173dffc4/attachment.htm>