<div dir="ltr"><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.<br></div><div><br></div>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.<br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Apr 15, 2023 at 11:07 AM Pete soper via TriEmbed <<a href="mailto:triembed@triembed.org">triembed@triembed.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>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.
:-)<br>
</p>
<p>Pete<br>
</p>
<div>On 4/15/23 01:32, Robert Mackie wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">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.<br>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Rob.</div>
</div>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Apr 14, 2023 at
7:06 PM Peter Soper via TriEmbed <<a href="mailto:triembed@triembed.org" target="_blank">triembed@triembed.org</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div>
<div style="font-family:monospace"> <span dir="ltr" style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px">The early days
of Linux - <a href="https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/928581/841b747332791ac4/" target="_blank">https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/928581/841b747332791ac4/</a></span>
<br>
<br>
<span dir="ltr" style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px">Pete</span>
<br>
</div>
</div>
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