[lug] Happy 30th, Linux

[Maxwell Spangler]

I started using Linux in 1992 sometime in its second year of life.

Like many others at the time, I had been using Unix at work but the
high cost of licensing it and the expensive hardware it required
prevented me from using Unix personally.  For example, I used SCO UNIX
without networking or X-windows, just the core OS for running programs
with users on serial terminals.

What I wanted was the Unix workstation experience such as those offered
by Sun, SGI, and, of course, NeXT.  The NeXT in particular looked like
the future: Unix power behind the scenes but an attractive display that
looked better than anything you'd find on MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, etc.

Linux as a Unix replacement was very interesting, but Linux with native
networking, actual X-windows and other Unix programs ported to it
running on commodity PC hardware was what we craved.  I remember
getting hooked when I saw X-windows running on a 386 PC with the basic
ISA video card and doing it well.  I literally thought: this PC is
doing all the things assumed to require a workstation but its just a
PC.  I was hooked.

I started with Linux on floppies: Slackware, Morse Telecommunications
and Soft Landing Systems (SLS).

When cdroms became available to me (1993) I used Yggdrasil, Slackware
and some early versions of Red Hat distributed by Walnut Creek
software.

It was Red Hat 3.0.3 (Picasso) that personally hooked me and I've been
a Red Hat / CentOS / Fedora user since that time.

Why not Debian? Because the early Debian installer program was
unfriendly and difficult to figure out.  At the point of installing the
software, you needed to keep the user excited, optimistic and
enthusiastic about using this new OS.  If the installer was difficult
and non-intuitive then it suggested the rest of the OS might be the
same.  So a lot of us tried it but returned to the friendly hand-
holding Red Hat experience instead.

On Wed, 2021-08-25 at 09:11 -0600, Jed S. Baer wrote:
> On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds posted his famous message to the
> comp.os.minix USENET group:
> 
> "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
> professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
> since
> april, and is starting to get ready."
> 
> How long have you been using Linux? I started in the summer of 1998,
> with
> RedHat 5.2.
> 

-- 
Maxwell Spangler
===================================================================
Denver, Colorado, USA
maxwellspangler.com
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