For those veteran linux people, what was it like back in 90s? I did see and hear of Unix systems being available for use but I did not see much apart from old versions of Debian in use.
Were they prominent in education like universities? Was it mainly a hobbyist thing at the time compared to the business needs of 98, 95 and classic mac?
I ask this because I found out that some PC games I owned were apparently also on Linux even in CD format from a firm named Loki.
I tried slackwear in '94. Getting it running was no big deal, but I had zero experience and documentation / help guides were thin. Installing applications or getting peripherals to work was prohibitively difficult without having a pretty decent amount of knowledge about it.
My high school had a rather large dose/novell Network but there was no internet yet. BBS’s were a thing and you could get a lot of installers and information from them. But they were all running in dos for the most part
My college had a VAX, it was more or less there just to get email and power a metric ass load of terminals in the library for research purposes. They really tried to keep you out of the CLI, everything was menued. I figured out that you could go for it to a South African University about seven times in a row and it would explode and give you a telnet session, but even then I wasn’t really working with an OS shell. The school had a computer lab. It was all Windows 3 and Novell, No internet for the longest time.
My ISP had options to dial up into a terminal session. My home dial up line was awful. Trying to FTP over PPP was a fool’s errand. I started getting used to connecting to my ISP and FTPing files down to their local node on with their T1 and then switching over to z modem to download the files to my house with the ability to auto restart on failure.
I didn’t try to run a Linux based OS again until Gnome came out.
There’s already a ton of great examples which I can relate (I’ve been using linux since 1998 or 99) but maybe the biggest difference today, apart from that everything is SO MUCH EASIER now, is that the internet wasn’t really the thing it is today. Specially the bandwidth. It took hours and hours over the phone line to download anything, on a good day you could get 100MB just under 4 hours. Of course things were a lot smaller too back then, but it still took ages and I’m pretty sure I now have more bandwidth on my home connection than most of the local universities had back in the 90s.
Hearing your monitor squeal when you got the modelines wrong was fun.
Could you please elaborate? I’ve no idea what that sentence means, so it sounds really wild to me 😅
Back when CRT monitors were a thing and all this fancy plug’n’play technology wasn’t around you had modelines on your configuration files which told the system what kind of resolutions and refresh rates your actual hardware could support. And if you put wrong values there your analog and dumb monitor would just try to eat them as is with wildly different results. Most of the time it resulted just in a blank screen but other times the monitor would literally squeal when it attempted to push components well over their limits. And in extreme cases with older monitors it could actually physically break your hardware. And everything was expensive back then.
Fun times.
Squreeee
CRT monitors internally use an electron gun which just fires electrons at the phosporous screen (from, the back, obviously, and the whole assembly is one big vacuum chamber with the phosporous screen at the front and the electron gun at the back) using magnets to twist the eletcron stream left/right and up/down.
In practice the way it was used was to point it to the start of a line were it would start moving to the other side, then after a few clock ticks start sending the line data and then after as many clock ticks as there were points on the line, stop for a few ticks and then swipe it to the start of the next line (and there was a wait period for this too).
Back in those days, when configuring X you actually configured all this in a text file, low level (literally the clock frequency, total lines, total points per line, empty lines before sending data - top of the screen - and after sending data as well as OFF ticks from start of line before sending data and after sending data) for each resolution you wanted to have.
All this let you defined your own resolutions and even shift the whole image horizontally or vertically to your hearts content (well, there were limitations on things like the min and max supported clock frequency of the monitor and such). All that freedom also meant that you could exceed the capabilities of the monitor and even break it.
My community college(1997) had a Suse linux computer lab that I learned on. It was mostly used as a networking/server and programming platform.
Loki was the leading porting developer at the time.
I’m not sure I consider myself a “veteran” since I still used Windows most of the time back then, but I used it in the late 90s. This is all anecdotal from my perspective, but the late 90s Linux experience was pretty rough on the desktop side, especially installing it. I actually rarely saw Debian in use, it was usually Red Hat for the sane people or Slackware for the lunatics. There were a few notable Linux game ports, but generally speaking, gaming wasn’t something most people did or even expected to do in Linux. I think I had a small handful games that weren’t terminal roguelikes: Doom, Quake, Tux Racer, and Alpha Centauri ( this one might have been early 2000s, hard to recall ). I can’t say I personally saw anyone openly using it at the university level in almost any form when I attended, I saw a lot of Unix though. Everyone I knew that was using Linux was younger and did have a slightly hobbyist leaning, with the more serious people usually using OpenBSD or FreeBSD.
I first used Linux in the late 90s, and it was just something that worked better on an older box. I installed Red Hat on an old 286 and the fun part was honestly getting it to work and learning about computers. Then one day I realized that I was spending all my free time working inside on this thing, but I was living on the water, in the Florida Keys, with access to boats and jet skis and pretty much anything. That had been my dream my whole life and all of a sudden I was living it. And I didn’t even have to be at work, right next door, until 10am. I was on a break from school then, and that’s actually what caused me to change my major from CS. I didn’t think it would be helpful to spend my whole life indoors!
Now I’m a physics teacher and I sometimes teach my 9th graders how to use Python for simple things like graphing. I love my life and I’m really thankful I keot computers as a hobby rather than as my profession.
Well, if
is now, was back then.
Ah, Linux from scratch…
Also, hardware was… Harder back then, on Linux (mostly modems).
Beside that, software wise there was less stuff on Linux than today, so you had to check carefully you had what you needed.
But I was already a Linux user, and a linux-only user at that.
Modems were easy. Stick the serial cable in. Done.
Well, only “real” modems… Those amazing piece of crap that offloaded hardware to the windows driver where… Questionable.
And they started appearing around windows 95/98.
Is was those crappy winmodems that caused all the problems. They cheaped out on hardware, so you basically got a sound card. All of the work had to be done by the driver, which also put a lot of load on your CPU. Serial modems just worked since everything was done in hardware.
Ah, right I’d forgotten about those. Of course they weren’t actually modems. So there’s also that.
I had erased that information from my memory. Also it took a long time for Linux to gain USB support, then a long time to get WIFI (also because of the cheap vendors that used windows drivers to do the heavy lifting). Yeah, it was a very uphill struggle, with Microsoft actively pushing against Linux (remember the ‘Linux is a virus’ narrative?) I’m amazed we made it this far.
I got a copy of Turbolinux 6 (released in 2000) from somebody at a Hamfest, but couldn’t get it to install and run.
Two years later, I was successful in running Debian and Gentoo.
Linux was in use on some university machines although I lot of them were still running Sun hardware OS. The main distribution I used at the time was Slackware.
Way back in the early 90s I needed to use LaTeX for university. The dos version was awful and couldn’t handle large documents. So the options were (1) a nextcube for $$$$, (2) Nextstep 3.3 for PCs for $$$ (some faculty had this), or (3) linux. So I downloaded slackware on dozens of disks.
You had to configure the kernel, which wasn’t too hard since the autoconfig walked you through it. The hardest part was setting up X11, which required a lot of manual config, and if you screwed up the timings you could destroy a CRT monitor. OpenStep was an option, so there was a moderately friendly windowmanager available.
Learning Emacs was also fairly unpleasant, but that was the best option for editing TeX at the time.
Everything would work, until it suddenly would break. But nonetheless I was somehow able to get that thesis done.
Ugh, modern linux is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much better
Just to add to this, early on there was no such thing as kernel modules, so you had to compile your own kernel with the hardware support you needed for anything beyond basic (if I remember it correctly, it was only basic processor stuff, keyboard and text mode VGA) hardware support.
So I downloaded slackware on dozens of disks.
This is no joke. When I downloaded Slackware in '95 or '96, it was over 100 3.5" floppies of 1.44 MB each. And there were still more available, those were just the ones I thought I’d need. And before you could even begin installing, each of those had to be downloaded, written and verified because floppies were not terribly reliable.
I got a disk of suse Linux from a library book. I put it on my laptop and it worked-ish.
I didn’t know what partitions were so I messed up my laptop pretty bad. But I learned more in that little bit than my undergrad degree.
I went to college in 93, and they ran a Unix mainframe with thin clients connected to it in the computer labs.
I didn’t really know much about any computers then, but I learned quick and had nerdy friends teach me a lot. Home computers ran DOS, but this fancy thing called Linux had entered the scene and nerds played with it.
I remember it being a bear. My comp sci roommate did most of the work, but he’d dole out mini projects to me to help him out. You had to edit text files with your exact hardware parameters or else it wouldn’t work. Like resolutions, refresh rates, IRQs, mouse shit, printer shit - it was maddening. And then you’d compile that all for hours. And it always failed. Many hardware things just weren’t ever going to work.
Eventually we got most things working and it was cool as beans. But it took weeks - seriously. We were able to act as a thin client to the mainframe and run programs right from our apartment instead of hauling ourselves to the computer lab. Interestingly, on Linux, that was the first time I had ever gotten a modem and a mouse working together. It was either/or before that.
It was both simultaneously horrific and fantastic at the same time. By the time windows 95 rolled out, the Unix mainframe seemed old and archaic. All the cool kids were playing Warcraft 2 and duke nukem 3D.
Was it mainly a hobbyist thing at the time
Yes, I’d say so. Lots of tech geeks were playing with it but no Normals. Getting audio running was not always pleasant…
I’m so divorced from normalcy I have no frame of reference. Do normal people who don’t do this stuff for a living use Linux now, outside handheld gaming devices? I figured they just used whatever came on whatever device they wanted to buy.
Do normal people who don’t do this stuff for a living use Linux now, outside handheld gaming devices?
I run into folks using linux fairly often in tech hobbies. Ham operators, DIY solar folk, people dorking around with a RasPi, etc. And some Normals who want a lighter experience than Win.
Last dedicated windows box I ran at home was Windows NT 4, IIRC. Last time I had to use it at work was Win7 (?) before I retired. I do have a Win7 virtual somewhere around here I spin up every couple years to run something obscure I can’t get to run in WINE.
I can’t remember if it was 99 or 2000, I got a copy of Red Hat 6.0 (Hedwig) on the cover of a magazine and installed it. I remember the Lilo boot manager giving me trouble and then it was multiple days of dialing up the internet on my dad’s PC to find info on getting X11 to run correctly on my graphics hardware. Once I got that going it was my win modem that defeated me in the end, couldn’t get any internet. So was back to Windows for another couple of years.
In 2003 my university course had a Linux Administration subject and the lecturer had built a live cd of Fedora Core 2 (this was in the days before live cds were a regular thing) it was a revelation and it worked with much less setup. We had a Linux lab, but the livecd allowed us to work on Linux on our personal machines. I’d dabble with Linux and explore distros for a few years, depending on hard ware compatibility, I’d always have at least one Linux box. I remember attempting to get HalfLife 2 running in Cedega (a commercial fork of wine), even played the original left4dead with friends, this was in 2008. I was there when pulse audio launched before it was ready and when KDE moved to version 4 and was an absolute resource hog. I bought the unreal and tournament games on disc to play on Linux. Was Disappointed when the UT3 release got delayed and then eventually canceled. I remember going to the id software ftps to get the Linux binaries for all the quakes. There were a few other Linux adventures in there, like a misguided attempt at compiling Gentoo in 2007 and working out mythtv server as a media pc and pvr.
Was excited when I got beta access to steam in 2012, and I haven’t had Windows on my personal computers since then.
I installed and tinkered with Red Hat 5.2 from CD around 97 or 98.
the first contact i had with linux back in mid-90’s brazil was with my isp’s login terminal, which displayed some arcane text reading “red hat linux version x.x”. after that, during my father’s final years working in bank of brazil he had to deal with cobra’s homemade distro in his workstations (cobra had developed an unix in the 80s that run on m68k’s, so no surprises here). it was an absolutely esoteric system to those who only knew the dos/windows 3.11 duo, since w95 only arrived in our country in numbers only in 96. the thing really caught on during the early to mid-2000’s, with faster and cheaper adsl connections, and with them, abundant knowledge and downloads available to any script kid.
I remember using Conectiva Linux in Brazil. Also tried Kurumin Linux, both Brazilian distros. The biggest pain I recall from these years was to make a modem work and I ended up buying an expensive US Robotics, which worked like a charm.
