
How I came to find Linux - pythonist
http://ianmurdock.com/post/how-i-came-to-find-linux/
======
jhallenworld
Well when Linux came out I was just annoyed that I hadn't been the one to do
it. A friend of mine (the author of TinyMush) and I were certainly thinking
about it at the time (I had embedded OS design experience, but none with
virtual memory so maybe we would not have pulled it off). Also don't forget
that the enabling technology was gcc and there was the example of Minix.

We did contribute to the floppy driver. The original driver read a block at a
time before incurring a rotational latency. I had had enough of this slowness
with SCO Xenix, so added a track buffer to speed it up on Linux. My friend
wrote the original generic SCSI driver, to support a film scanner.

I think we may have made one of the earliest products using Linux. We worked
for an entrepreneur who started a business selling medical image archiving and
teleradiography equipment. In those days, ct-scan machines and MRI machines
had no networking. To get images from them you had to capture the image sent
to the console screen or use the 3M laser camera parallel interface. (My job
was to make cards for this capturing). Image transfer was over phone lines
using sz/rz and Telebit Trailblazer modems.

Anyway, at some point one machine did have network (I think it was some
proprietary interface, not DICOM). The problem was that Linux did not yet have
a networking stack. The solution? Use "KA9Q", the amateur radio TCP/IP stack
in userspace for this.

At some point Pat Volkerding (Slackware) also worked with us. I remember he
was a big deadhead at the time, wrote Slackware while living in parent's
basement. We were half installing / half developing a teleradiography system
after hours in Eastern Long Island Hospital.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
You should strongly consider writing a blog article about your experiences,
there's some really great bits of trivia you're describing. Particularly about
crossing paths with Patrick Volkerding (he's still a diehard deadhead from
what I know).

~~~
heywire
I'll second this. I love reading stories like this.

------
varlock
I remember being introduced to Linux by our programming TA, who used to come
at classes with the 'You need Python' t-shirt (it was early '00s for me). "So
you don't need to reboot after installing a program?" \- I was shocked. And in
awe.

Then I jumped in the library and got myself a manual based on the UNIX 'System
V R4' and am still amazed how 15 years later all commands still make sense
(BTW, a link to the PDF copy of the SVR1 manual has passed here on HN a few
days ago - I _so_ recommend it to anyone starting out[0]).

Dissatisfied with RedHat, Mandrake and SUSE I fell in love with the minimalist
Slackware - that was my first true love, the one you will never forget.

Good memories, made of long nights recompiling the kernel, failing and wonder
why nothing boots anymore, giggling when modprobing the module for the
wireless device, and dreading leaving the home server up at nights with port
22 open (did I harden it enough?).

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052592](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10052592)

~~~
nnoitra
No, you don't need to reboot Linux. You need to consistently make fixes which
include go to this config, change this line so that this software-package
doesn't crash. Oh, it still doesn't work then please reformat it.

If you want an OSX which doesn't require reboots OSX is the answer.

~~~
zxcvcxz
I think this is what happens when you try installing Gentoo or Arch, configure
everything your self, and then realize you didn't do it right and now it's a
constant headache. New users should really stick with the easiest to use
distros like Ubuntu or Fedora, which IMO are on par with OS X in terms of
usability and simplicity.

~~~
mrks_
I think calling Ubuntu _on par_ with OS X is a stretch. Not that it's that
far, but I've had many more stability issues with the LTS versions of Ubuntu
than with Mavericks or even Yosemite.

I agree, though, that sticking to Ubuntu or Fedora for new users is a great
idea. They are both excellent operating systems with regard to simplicity.

~~~
zxcvcxz
>I've had many more stability issues with the LTS versions of Ubuntu than with
Mavericks or even Yosemite.

By any chance are you running OS X on Apple hardware? If we took OS X and
installed it on an Ubuntu Certified Dell PC we may find that _it_ has the
stability issues, so if you _are_ comparing it to OS X running on Apple
hardware it's not a very fair comparison, as it's being run under ideal
circumstances and Linux is not.

~~~
thesimpsons1022
that may be "theoretically" the fair comparison. but in practice, most people
run osx on apple hardware and linux on any hardware. So to get an actual
comparison of the user experience, it is fair to compare them on different
hardware.

~~~
cbd1984
So OS X is unusably more expensive.

~~~
thesimpsons1022
is there a reason you decided to repost this?

------
drewg123
Wow, that's a remarkably similar story to mine. Except I wound up with FreeBSD
because of, well, Linus.

I had a very similar journey. For me, I got hooked on computers when my mom (a
programmer at a defense contractor) would take me in to work when she didn't
have a sitter. I got to hang out in the computer room and play adventure on
the minicomputers they had in the late 70s. I had the typical Apple II
experience many of us had in the early 80s. I learned to type by typing in
those games from Byte (and how to debug by finding my typos), eventually
writing my own games and learning 6502 assembly.

Flash forward to university and my first Unix account on an always-melting-
down sparc server. There were dozens of DEC VT220 terminals in our public lab
at UB in 1989, but only a few Xterminals which were highly coveted. My friends
and I jumped at the chance to use them. Most of us eventually got on-campus
jobs or internships with the goal of getting unfettered access to Sun or
DECstation workstations. I _STILL_ use some of the same keyboard shortcuts
from my 1990 .twmrc, and my .cshrc, .Xdefaults and .emacs files have all just
evolved from then (and yes, I still use tcsh).

The first time I installed Linux was from a stack of 3.5" floppies sometime in
1993 when I was a grad student at a different school. I was a huge Linux fan.

A year later, I met Linus at the '94 Linux BOF at the USENIX in Boston. At the
time, I was trying to convince our dept to buy PCs rather than Suns or DECs to
replace some wheezing grad student workstations. However, I ran into a problem
where we used LaTeX, and it kept its fonts on a central NFS server (these were
the days when disk space was precious, there were no package managers, and
everything was installed by hand --- so installing stuff to NFS was very
common). The 12MHz Mips R2000 DECstation 2100s we had (our slowest machines)
would render a page of text in a second or two using xdvi. However, a test
Linux machine (which was a blazingly fast 66MHz 486) would take 10x as long. I
eventually figured out that this was because Linux NFS did not do any file
caching at the time, and xdvi was seeking around byte by byte in the font
files.

I was very excited to meet Linus, and was really looking forward to the USENIX
BOF. So when I asked Linus about NFS file caching, he blew me off in what I
now know is a typical Linus like fashion, and said he didn't care about NFS.
So I went to the very friendly and welcoming FreeBSD BOF, found out that NFS
works, and never looked back.

~~~
yitchelle
> So when I asked Linus about NFS file caching, he blew me off in what I now
> know is a typical Linus like fashion, and said he didn't care about NFS.

I have always wondered if Linus was a bit for friendly, would the Linux
community have gotten a lot more mainstream faster?

~~~
zxcvcxz
>I have always wondered if Linus was a bit for friendly, would the Linux
community have gotten a lot more mainstream faster?

I don't think it would have made a difference. *BSD has never really become
mainstream unless you count Apple, which I don't. I think the main barrier to
Linux success on the desktop is the fact that in my life I've rarely seen
advertisements for Linux, while Apple and Microsoft seem to be everywhere.

I think if a Linux distro had a huge advertising campaign it could actually
snag a sizable portion of the desktop market.

~~~
dredmorbius
FreeBSD powered both Yahoo and Hotmail initially, though both have _largely_
replaced it (I don't know that they've completely done so). BSD's networking
stack offered genuine advantages at the time.

~~~
sbuk
It still does, since Linux, OSX _and_ Windows' stacks are all based on it!

------
pjmlp
I discovered Slackware Linux in 1995's summer with 1.0.9 kernel, still using
a.out format and first support for non SCSI CD-ROM drives. Had to use the
installation from a MS-DOS partition.

Already knew Aix and Xenix back then, but having UNIX at home was great and I
became a bit too much FOSS Zealot.

Nowadays I use all OSes and the Zealot guy has been replaced by a pragmatic
guy that uses whatever makes sense for the business.

------
fit2rule
I remember the joy I felt when I downloaded Linux for the first time and
booted it on my 386 .. it was like I was suddenly granted access to the
hallowed halls of technology. I'd been a Unix guy for a decade before that,
but never able to afford my own machine .. working with a Magnum pizzabox at
work, but a lame DOS PC at home, it was always very frustrating to me. But
when I got on the minix-list and saw Linus' post a few days later, I was
instantly transported into an .. at the time .. elite new world.

Never looked back, and its amazing to me today to see just how far we've come.
Truly a phenomenal technology ..

~~~
jcadam
And now the situation for many of us is reversed - I have a powerful Linux
workstation at home where I work on my own projects, and a crappy under-
specced Dell running Windows at work. It is very frustrating to me :(

~~~
fit2rule
That is indeed a quandry! Virtualbox for the win! :)

~~~
jcadam
Try connecting a Linux box (or vm) to the network and you'll get to watch
Corporate IT throw a massive hissy-fit :|

~~~
toothbrush
Need they ever know if you do NAT instead of introducing a new IP on the
network (making sure that the Linux image isn't advertising any naughty
services like SSH of course)? Of course, on a corporate Windows box you may
not be root, i suppose...

Courage to you nonetheless! Time to find a job where you're root on your
machine? :)

------
m-i-l
I was setting up one of those new fangled web sites at the software company
for which I worked back in 1995. It was just two of us doing it in our spare
time, with me doing the software side of things and a colleague looking after
the hardware. He installed Slackware Linux on some hardware he had scavenged,
and I installed Apache, Perl and (slightly later) MySQL. These choices weren't
because we were visionaries or anything like that, but because we had zero
budget and didn't know any alternatives.

The funny thing is, I remember a few years later going for interviews and
being slightly bashful about our use of free software. But it was only after I
subsequently got a job at a much bigger company using very expensive
commercial software, which was an order of magnitude slower and mind
bogglingly unreliable not to mention completely opaque, that I came to realise
just how good some of the free software is.

------
dpcan
Wow, that's quite a story, he clearly took it more seriously than I did. Mine
is pretty simple, because I loved to tinker with OS's, and since everyone is
sharing...

My local ISP gave away shell account I could telnet to and access a home
directory that became a free website, ie theirispname.whatever/~myusername

I logged in, used HTML and Perl to do what I thought at the time to be the
most amazing stuff in the world. Found out they used a variety of Linux as I
sniffed around the commands available to me (like I had done with MS-DOS over
the past couple years).

Thought it was awesome, and I ended up putting Slackware on a couple of my old
systems people had donated to me and run little servers in my bedroom.
Eventually went to RedHat, then CentOS, now mostly Ubuntu.

At the time I saved up for, and bought, any books that said "Linux" on them
that came with CD's stuck to the back with a distro I could install :)

------
arethuza
Being used to Sun workstations, and then DEC Alpha boxen, it was rather cool
to be able to download and install a pretty complete Unix system on my PC at
home in '93/'94.

No Internet at home though so I had to get multiple boxes of floppies from
stores and download everything at work and then cycle home with them - I seem
to remember X and its applications being the single largest chunk of stuff to
install.

~~~
tyfon
I went through the floppy hell my self with something called minilinux first,
then slackware. After failing both I went out and bought a slackware book with
a CD and everything went much better.

Been a linux user ever since :)

------
dcminter
I remember being very chuffed with the fact that the boot and root disks (on
3.5" floppies) were physically smaller than my copy of "Portable Unix" [0]

Then a year or two later getting Dec$Write running on a V8650 to display on
the X11 server of a Linux box elsewhere on the campus instead of one of the
creaking DecStations we normally used.

Now I'm sitting in front of a laptop running Ubuntu and have an Android phone
in my pocket. Good times (then and now).

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/Portable-UNIX-Douglas-W-
Topham/dp/0471...](http://www.amazon.com/Portable-UNIX-Douglas-W-
Topham/dp/0471579262)

------
samstave
heh - in 1997-1999 I was replacing a novel network on token ring with a new IP
net. I had some B2B EDI crap that needed to be scripted to deliver files from
us to Sun...

I installed several linux servers and hired a couple contractors I knew to
manage the deployment. They setup these linux boxes and consulted supporting
them....

I went to one of them on day and said "you guys should just start a consulting
company offering linux support!"

A few weeks later, one of my consultants came back and said "Hey guess what!
We are starting a linux consulting company!"

I was excited... we talked briefly about me joining them, but that didnt work
out...

A little later - they were valued at over $1B!

Those consultants that worked for me on this in 99? Dave Sifry, Art Tide and
Chris DiBona.... They founded LinuxCare.

I later met Linus at one of the conferences and chatted with him for a bit, I
don't recall him not being friendly though... but that was the only time I met
with him.

------
faragon
I remember that in 1994-1995 Linux was a shock: you were able to run for free
in your personal computer a system that did similar things to SCO Unix or
Coherent (Unix clone) without the need of pirating it (students were used to
pirate SCO Unix 20 1.44MB floppies using a special DOS copy program called "PC
Trace" in order to copy non-DOS formatted disks, that "tradition" was lost
because Linux was able to run using less space, and usually performing quite
well on cheap hardware)

------
davidw
Even after all these years, sometimes something like this article makes me
stop and think how awesome it is, and how fortunate I am to have had Linux and
open source available. Having the freedom to learn about and tinker with
_everything_ is incredibly cool, and one reason I don't think I'll ever give
up Linux as my OS for... pretty much everything.

------
alkonaut
Wow, I did exactly the same thing, sneaking around in labs, carrying floppies,
saving pennies.

The only difference is that it was Duke Nukem on my floppies. I bet this guy
has a better paying gig these days :/

~~~
annnnd
I have no clue about his pay, but his karma must be very very high. Thank you
for giving us Debian!

------
terminalcommand
Murdock mentions that he was studying management at the time he got into
Linux. I couldn't find any further information about it. In Wikipedia it says
that he studied computer science in Germany. At some point in life he changed
majors. I'd very much like to read a post about that decision.

I share the love of computers. I spend all my free time in front of computers,
programming and reading. It's been like this for my whole life. Due to a twist
of fate (couldn't get a scholarship) I ended up in law school. I have no
interest in anything beside computers. I can't live without them, but it's
killing me to know that I can't study computer science. Any suggestions??

~~~
paublyrne
If you spend as much of your free time programming as you say, you'll probably
be spending more time programming than many CS students I've come across who
have no interest in computing, and you'll probably be much better at
programming than many CS graduates I've come across, who have hardly any
interest in computing.

Your passion will take you further than your college programme.

~~~
pjmlp
That wouldn't work at my university, unless it changed a lot on the last 20
years.

~~~
walshemj
Must be a minority then you know they built the raspberry pi to try and get
kids to have some programing experience at GCSE and A level (15-18)

This was so they didn't have to teach the basics on CS and EE courses

~~~
pjmlp
You are talking about UK.

On my Portuguese university, we got to code in standard Pascal, C, C++,
Prolog, Smalltalk, Caml Light, PL/SQL, 80x86 and MIPS Assembly, Java.

Many of the lectures were composed by exam + mini-project.

Anyone that made it without much coding was getting a ride in workgroups, on
single projects it was either code or fail.

------
RexRollman
Although my favorite free Unix-like is NetBSD, I have a great deal of
admiration for what Debian does and how it does it. To me, it is one of the
best Linux distibutions, along with Slackware and Arch.

~~~
keithpeter
Debian and Slackware: both roughly same age (Slackware releasing first).
Contrasting package management, patching policies and governance models. I
find the stable releases of both to be, well, _stable_.

------
noir_lord
For me it was visiting a friend who was using RH4 and seeing the stuff he was
doing, I was already a computer geek and programming quite a lot so the idea
of an open source operating system I could have the source code to was
incredible.

I broke the family PC a whole bunch of times (software not hardware) before I
managed to get linux onto and then onto the internet, after that nothing came
close as a platform to work on and so it's nearly 20 years and I still run it
to this day.

------
giodamelio
Awesome. I read the whole thing without reading the name of the author, so I
got to read the whole story without knowing it was written by Ian Murdock

------
ssharp
I was taking a Unix programming course in college and had a large enough
programming project that it was a burden to try and program on the terminal
through SSH or Telnet. Since I wasn't going to get Unix on my PC, I needed to
find an alternative and remember hearing about Linux in the past. This was
probably right around 2000.

I don't remember the reasons why, but I didn't download a distro and instead
went to Staples and bought the cheapest flavor they had for sale. I can't
remember what it was, but it had a GUI and text editor and all the backend
programming stuff I needed to do the project much more efficiently.

I ended up keeping that Linux partition around and used it to teach myself
Apache, MySQL, and PHP, which is what got me my first job our of college. That
company was an Apple shop, so that's when I was first introduced to OSX and
the need for a Linux desktop was eliminated for me.

~~~
paulryanrogers
My university was still using telnet around the same time. So I resorted to
floppies before finally breaking down and getting a laptop. Red Hat came
loaded on some of the college's surplus equipment. Before long I ended up
trying it on my laptop too.

Updating and driver support was weak back then. Thankfully this has improved a
lot. Ubuntu is also a more novice friendly alternative.

------
pcunite
I think it was Redhat Zoot (6.2) that was my first experience with Linux. It
had linuxconfig installed by default (I desperately needed the assistance).
The command line was so powerful over what Windows 95 had that I found it very
intriguing. It seemed like MS Dos 6 but so much better!

The later versions had xEarth installed which is so cool.

------
digi_owl
I think my first encounter was as a CD attached to a magazine. Sadly someone
had goofed and gotten a German variant of Slackware, as best i recall.

After that it was Suse and Mandrake in half-serious fashion.

Right now though i am using Gobolinux, after having it sit as a CD for a time
until i had Windows blow up on me for the nth time.

I should really do a clean reinstall, as some major changes has come down the
Linux pipeline since then. But at the same time, it basically works as it
stands.

And in a telling expression of where Linux is heading, the guy that prepared
the last iso for Gobolinux claims he spent more time getting the desktop parts
(Consolekit, polkit, dbus, etc) working than the kernel etc.

------
ithinkso
I've started about 9 years ago, we have only one computer in home used also by
my brother and father (diehard EE engineer that started with punched card
programming and _still_ writes, albeit great, software for embedded in
notepad++(syntax coloring) and copy-paste into IAR IDE) and I was craving for
linux but no one would allow me to install some strange OS. In 2006 I finally
got _mine_ first PC and I've installed ubuntu. I was enlightened so to speak,
ubuntu worked for me for quite a while until gnome3 and unity, then I've
switched to Arch and am using it ever since.

------
mettamage
This is the first time that I read a background story of someone who feels
similar to mine (which isn't to say it's a special story). I too got
interested in girls and stopped with my computer hobby. I too started business
school at first and eventually switched to computer science (started in 2010).

I always felt a bit out of place for having this origin story compared to
'normal computer science' students. I know it kind of sounds ridiculous, but
it never stopped me from feeling it. Murdock's story really gave me the
feeling that its just a silly thought I'm having :)

~~~
Delmania
I suspect a there's a bit of confirmation bias going on here. All we seem to
hear about on sites like HN, Reddit, TechCrunch are those individuals whose
interest in computers started at a very young age. I suspect if you aggregated
to all developers, a significant number, if not the majority have a story
similar to yours. For what it's worth, my story is like yours, I was
interested in my youth, found other interests, and didn't "find myself" until
college.

------
bvm
Could someone explain or link me to how revision control worked in the very
early days of the Linux kernel? I'm aware of BitKeeper, Git et al. but
interested in how things worked at its outset.

~~~
Sothis
Tarballs and patches for the first 10 years apparently!

[https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/LinusTalk200705Transcr...](https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/LinusTalk200705Transcript)

~~~
digi_owl
And partially why Linus insist on patches being broken down into digestible
parts before being sent his way. He would (will?) outright refuse patches that
touched multiple kernel subsystems in one go.

~~~
TorKlingberg
This also forces you to keep a backwards-compatible interface between the two
subsystems.

~~~
digi_owl
One lesson userspace fails to take in time and time again...

------
larrydag
My encounter with Linux was somewhat similar but mostly from having enough
with windoze. I had called a PC repair guru for the third time because of
virus's on my windoze PC in 2007. He told me about a Linux but I was skeptical
thinking it was more for the uber elite hackers. I tried out the Knoppix CD
and then installed SuSE. I was hooked immediately. Much like the article
writer's hook with being my own "superuser".

For those that haven't seen Revolution OS I would highly recommend it for much
of the Linux backstory.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c)

~~~
gegtik
amazing that in 2015 people are still saying stuff like "windoze",
"micro$haft", etc.

~~~
roghummal
>amazing

It really isn't.

~~~
WalterGR
Yup. Slashdot is still one of the ~1,500 most popular sites on the web.

------
anti-shill
I have used and installed linux many times. I have ubuntu on a dual boot on
this computer. But linux on the desktop is going nowhere now that android is
on the scene. Yeah, I understand that android is based on linux. But android
is the big alternative man on campus now.

~~~
mikekchar
For me, as Linux on the desktop got more and more mainstream, I started to
feel more and more left out. I moved from Debian to Ubuntu because I thought
"I just want my computer to work without having to mess with it". Over time,
Ubuntu made many decisions that I disagreed with and I spent huge amounts of
effort trying to figure out how to uninstall things (which is quite difficult
for a Debian based distro since the configuration often assumes you want
everything integrated).

I finally ended up with an Arch system running xmonad and huge numbers of
terminal based apps. I'm finally happy with my system again. What I realized
is that I specifically _don 't_ want a Mac-like/Windows-like/shinkwrapped
experience. I want choice and freedom, because what I like is not necessarily
what the masses (or Mark Shuttleworth or Redhat or Gnome developers) want.

I kind of picked on your post because even though it is kind of negative, I
think there are quite a lot of people who think the same way. It's a valid
opinion, but a bit unfortunate. The advantage of a (dare I say Gnu/) Linux
system or a BSD system is the freedom from being told how you are going to use
your computer. It's not having to put up with some stupid design decision just
because it was pushed by a popular company and now the masses are used to it.
It the ability to explore, experiment and create with absolutely no
boundaries.

It is popular enough and gives me more of everything I want than OSes that are
more visible to the masses.

~~~
toothbrush
A hundred times this. Same setup for me, except that i'm considering moving to
Stump WM or Guile-WM as a result of heavily drinking the Lisp / Libre koolaid.
Let people pry my Emacs and tiling window manager from my cold dead hands! :)

~~~
zeveb
StumpWM is really, _really_ nice to use. And it integrates great with
emacs+SLIME.

It's really the wave of the future.

~~~
toothbrush
Yeah so i'm not sure, i'm probably saying really stupid stuff now, but i love
the way my WM (Xmonad as stated before) is really simple as far as key
bindings go: no chords. I like that, because i don't want RSI. I have the
impression though that moving more towards an Emacs way of managing my
desktops would be laborious, frankly. Maybe i'm just projecting after my
disagreeable experience with Ratpoison (only a 2-pane split? Hm.).

~~~
zeveb
> i love the way my WM (Xmonad as stated before) is really simple as far as
> key bindings go: no chords

Really? Looking at the docs ([http://xmonad.org/manpage.html#default-keyboard-
bindings](http://xmonad.org/manpage.html#default-keyboard-bindings)) it looks
like it has mod-KEY and mod-shift-KEY chords. Nothing wrong with that, of
course.

It's easy enough to set up StumpWM to support those bindings, if one wishes.
Not saying that everyone should be using it, of course! xmonad's a fine WM I'm
sure.

