Linux 3.0

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sun, May 29, 2011, geoffrey mendelson wrote about "Re: Linux 3.0":
> As for your using Linux for 18 years, that would put you starting in  
> 1993. That surprises me because I have been using Linux since mid 1995  
> and in those days it was not much more than a curiosity, and not  
> something that you would want to replace UNIX with.  In fact, in those  
> days I was buying CD ROMS with several versions of Linux and BSD on  
> them, and BSD was far richer and more reliable than Linux. I remember  
> the disasterous Linux over DOS filesystem which if you were not  
> careful deleted your boot blocks. I don't even want to remember how  
> many times I had to rebuild them  on various computers.

Well, I believe I did start using Linux around 1993 (I'm not 100% sure
about the exact year). I remember vaguely the kernel was Linux 0.99 or
something low like that, its logo around that time was a shark (before the
penguin logo was adopted). The distribution I used was slackware, which
I downloaded to 30 or so diskettes on a network-connected Macintosh we
had laying around in the Math department in the technion. I did not have
Linux on a CD-ROM until several years later, when I got Redhat 5.2 on
a CD-ROM, causing me to switch to Redhat (I have been using Redhat and Fedora
ever since).

The most significant reason we (my father and I) switched our home computer
from Unix (System Vr4) to Linux was X Windows: Despite us having a fancy
(for the time) VGA card, System Vr4 had no windowing system. Being used
to Windowing systems like AT&T's blit, the X Window System on SunOS, and,
yes, I sadly admit - also Windows 3.1 - this was really annoying. A VGA
is a terrible thing to waste ;-) So we replaced SVR4 by Linux. Perhaps
initially it wasn't as stable, but we never looked back - Linux, and
perhaps more importantly, Linux distributions, had much more features than
AT&T Unix. Soon afterwards, I stopped booting the machine to the
Windows partition.

> When I made aliyah in 1996, I brought with me one of those disks, and  
> left it on the ceiling of the HUJI CS department's system group. At  
> that time they had a site license to to a BSD version and were using  
> that for X86 UNIX, although the first year students had a farm of  
> Windows/NT computers.

I'm guessing you're referring to BSDI ?

> Ironically while I was there I helped beta test what became Red Hat  
> Linux release 6, with the brand new and seriously broken kernel based  
> NFS server. By the time it was released it had been fixed. I recently  
> went back to the user NFS server, dropping the kernel one because it  
> causes data loss and kernel panics if you share a USB disk.

My first experiences with Linux was in a home setting, where the occasional
bug and broken kernel could be forgiven ;-) In all my 18 years of using
Linux I can only suspect one incident of losing data because of a kernel
bug (and even in that case, I am not sure). I've lost much more to faulty
hardware, human errors, and malicious attacks.


-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |       Monday, May 30 2011, 26 Iyyar 5771
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |My typos are intentional copyright traps.
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |