I got my start with Linux by buying a set of 5.25in floppies for SLS from some random person on Usenet. It came with Linux kernel version 0.99pl13, IIRC. My first PC compatible system was a Gateway 2000 386 system with a whopping 4MB of RAM and a new / fancy IDE drive. I don’t think I had to deal with harder-to-configure MFM or RLL drives at home, just at work.
My home network in the next years got a couple NE2000 Ethernet cards, so I could try out NFS and other networking.
If you think about it, it’s pretty surprising that Linus continued in university through 1996 to finish his MS even after multiple companies in the US had been founded based on his work in 1992-1993!
Hah, crazy. Lars spoke about this at our tech bi-weekly a few weeks ago (we work for the same company)—he’s a very knowledgeable guy with a great sense of humour.
This is wild to me, because I never really put two and two together. I was a very early Slackware user, I remember the guy at the office who had the giant stacks of 3.5” floppies rubber banded together in his desk drawer. I never ran it as a daily driver in that era (I used an Indigo, and then a Next slab, and then a Mac), but that would’ve been in … 1994? Maybe?
Someone posted this earlier, but they didn’t post the subscriber link for non-subscribers to read it, so the post was deleted.
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Young Linus: Beats OG Prince Of Persia, then says “that was too easy, I’m bored” and so goes on to write an operating system. :-P
Nice to hear the inside story.
I got my start with Linux by buying a set of 5.25in floppies for SLS from some random person on Usenet. It came with Linux kernel version 0.99pl13, IIRC. My first PC compatible system was a Gateway 2000 386 system with a whopping 4MB of RAM and a new / fancy IDE drive. I don’t think I had to deal with harder-to-configure MFM or RLL drives at home, just at work.
My home network in the next years got a couple NE2000 Ethernet cards, so I could try out NFS and other networking.
If you think about it, it’s pretty surprising that Linus continued in university through 1996 to finish his MS even after multiple companies in the US had been founded based on his work in 1992-1993!
Hah, crazy. Lars spoke about this at our tech bi-weekly a few weeks ago (we work for the same company)—he’s a very knowledgeable guy with a great sense of humour.
This is wild to me, because I never really put two and two together. I was a very early Slackware user, I remember the guy at the office who had the giant stacks of 3.5” floppies rubber banded together in his desk drawer. I never ran it as a daily driver in that era (I used an Indigo, and then a Next slab, and then a Mac), but that would’ve been in … 1994? Maybe?