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’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.
My linux experience:
1993 - Hey, there’s a new Unix-like thing for the PC. You can check it out down at the university computer club.
1994 - Wow, I finally managed to get X running
1996 - It was somewhat normal for more nerdy software developers to run linux full-time on their desktop at work.
1998 - Linux was taking over servers to the point where you rarely saw Solaris, HP-UX, AIX around any more.
2002 - Everyone agreed that linux was pretty much ready to take over the desktop as well.
I used it in a university course in '95, not sure what distro, but customising your shell prompt, and setting automatic timed updates for the wallpaper in tvwm certainly felt like the future. Different and electric.
We would play the linux shareware first release of quake in 12-16 player. Hiding the executable by renaming it ekauq… didn’t work, still got removed from our directories.
There were installfests at the local LUG, which were a fun way to share tips and help others.
One Linux support business existed in our town in the 90s, installing and fixing Linux boxen for businesses. Mostly home/hobby use though.
Slashdot.org was covering the majority of Linux news. Either MS FUD or the nonsense SCO lawsuit, amongst all the positive advances.
Linux conferences were a fun way to make it more real and see many of the big names behind the movement and technologies.
Installed RedHat 4 or 5.1 around 98 and then found the power of Debian. Currently running Trisquel GNU/Linux because it is a fully libre distro with no proprietary blobs or other obfuscated parts.
Many thanks to RMS and all FLOSS contributors, there is such an incredible spectrum of tools available for free use. It has been great to see the progression and expansion over the decades.
It was a struggle. You went to buy some device and you had to check it was not one of those windows-only ones. Modems were particularly bad, for example.
You had to read the how-tos and figure things out. Mailing lists and newsgroups were the only places to find some help.
You had to find the shop willing to honour warranty on the parts and not on the whole system, as they had no knowledge of Linux at all. But once you found them, you were a recurring customer so they were actually happy. You might even have ended up showing them memtest86!
You would still be able to configure the kernel and be able to actually know some of those names, compilation would take several hours but it was a learning experience.
You could interact with very helpful kernel developers and get fixes to test.
You could have been the laughing stock of your circles of friends, but within you, you knew who’d have had the last laugh.
And yes, Loki games had some titles working on Linux natively, Railroad Tycoon was one. Too bad they were ahead of the times and didn’t last much.
compilation would take several hours but it was a learning experience.
the first time i put gentoo on a g3 imac back in 2004; it took 3 days to compile everything and the computer got so hot that it warmed up the entire room like a space heater. lol
windows-only ones. Modems
And, of course, they’d almost never actually SAY that on the box, so you had to see if you could look at what exact chip was on them and explain to a retail employee why you needed to look in the box, and that no, you certainly weren’t doing something sketchy, you just use Linux instead of wait why are you calling security…
“software” modems and soundcards. yeah.
Ah yes, the (in?)famous mWave cards come to mind here.
So shitty they not only didn’t work in Linux, they ALSO never fucking worked right in Windows, either, and got IBM sued over what utter trash they were.
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 😅
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.
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
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.
Ah, yes, Linux around the turn of the century. Let’s see…
GPU acceleration? In your dreams. Only some cards had drivers, and there were more than 2 GPU manufacturers back then, too… We had ATi, nVidia, 3dfx, Cirrus, Matrox, Via, Intel… and almost everyone held their driver source cards close to their chest.
Modems? Not if they were “winmodems”, which had no hardware controller, the CPU and the Windows driver (which was always super proprietary) did all the hard work.
Sound? AC’97 software audio was out of the question. See above. You had to find a sound blaster card if you wanted to get audio to work right.
So, you know how modern linux has software packages? Well, back then, we had Slackware, and it compiled everything gentoo style back then. In addition, everyone had a hardon for " compiling from source is better"… so your single core Pentium II had to take its time compiling on a UDMA66-connected hard drive, constrained with 32 or 64 MB RAM. Updating was an overnight procedure.
RedHat and Debian were godsends for people who didn’t want to waste their time compiling… which unfortinately was more common even so, because a lot of software was source only.
Oh, and then MP3 support was ripped out of RedHat in Version 9 iirc, the last version before they split it into RHEL and Fedora. RIP music.
As for Linux on a Mac, there was Yellowdog, which supported the PPC iMacs and such. It was decently good, but I had to write my own x11 monitor settings file (which I still have on a server somewhere, shockingly, I should throw it on github or somewhere) to get the screen to line up and work right.
Basically, be glad Linux has gone from the “spend a considerable amount of time and have programming / underhood linux knowledge to get it working” to “insert stick, install os, start using it” we have now.
In addition, everyone had a hardon for " compiling from source is better"
I mean, optimization had more of an impact on the weak CPU’s back then, no?
That only matters if there’s anything to optimize by source compilation. If the program doesn’t have optimization features in the source, it’s wated time and energy.
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.
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.
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.
Ah, right I’d forgotten about those. Of course they weren’t actually modems. So there’s also that.
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.
Heard about linux from someone at school in -95, I was 15 at the time. No idea where he had heard about it. Brought a stack of floppy disks and downloaded slackware on a school computer. Of course some of the disks had read errors so had to copy them again the next day but eventually I got slackware installed. In spring of -96 redhat 3.0.3 was released which I for some reason bought the full version of, still have the box in my bookcase. Since then I have been a pretty much 100% linux desktop user. Well 95% since I was dual booting windows for games for a long time.
I spent a lot of time back then learning linux by experimentation and hanging out on IRC talking to people about linux. As others have said, you had to compile the kernel because there were no kernel modules (had forgotten about that!) and I remember being quite fast in navigating the kernel configuration menus. I wouldn’t even know where to start nowadays! :)
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.
It was prominent in smaller businesses that wanted or needed a Unix but weren’t going to pay what sun or IBM or HP and friends wanted for their hardware+software.
It ate the proprietary Unix market awfully quickly and I don’t think anyone really misses it.
For me, educational stuff was all windows with a small amount of macs and I don’t think I ever saw a Linux system in actual use anywhere.
I used it on the desktop but that was super rare because hardware support was nowhere as good as now - even getting X up was a challenge (go read up on mode lines if you want some entertainment).
For me, educational stuff was all windows with a small amount of macs and I don’t think I ever saw a Linux system in actual use anywhere.
Linux systems started being common in CompSci schools around mid-90s, around the time LAMP took off (fun fact, Apache, MySQL and PHP were all launched in 1995).
Previously in CompSci you’d get to use all kinds of UNIX servers. My uni still had Solaris servers with dumb terminals, and I got my first sysadmin certification on SCO.UNIX / OpenServer.
I was doing english lit stuff in that era so what showed up on the tech side was a little different. Ended up spending my entire career actually in IT (25 years now ugh I’m old) because it turns out uh, there’s not any money in a english degree.
Ah, the golden age. I dunno, I was running FreeBSD. It was awesome. It still is.
You could buy box copies of the original suse Linux that had manuals in the box the size of a TI graphing calculator manual.
Once you got X working everything else was cake by comparison.
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.
Loki distributed alpha centauri if I remember correctly? Awesome game. The windows version is actually easier to run on Linux than the original Linux release nowadays.
From my perspective, anything pre-ubuntu was a colossal ballache for a desktop system. I played around with suse, mandrake, etc prior to that but getting things working often felt like a chore.
