

Linux 20 Years: Anecdotes from 1998 - wmat
http://liw.fi/linux-anecdotes/

======
guns
_One of his well-known quotes is: "Backups are for wimps. Real men upload
their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it."_

That strategy turned out rather well, I'd say.

~~~
DrHankPym
I really liked that quote, too, but what do you mean turned out rather well?

~~~
guns
Linus repeats this line WRT distributed systems during his famous talk about
git:

 _"I have a theory about backups; I don't do them. I put stuff up on one site
and everybody else mirrors it."_

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8#t=17m4s>

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watmough
Yes, it was an amazing time. I started with the Yggdrasil distribution

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X>

which ran (I think) pretty happily on a Dell Dimension 486DX2 with a fairly
small drive, 300 MB or so.

Even then, with getting X running being kinda tricky, Linux was a big step up
from Windows 3.1 and all the contortions you had to do to free up base RAM
whilst stuck in the crappy memory model.

~~~
dcminter
I started with the root and boot disks - then moved onto the Soft Landing
System (SLS) disk set. From that to Slackware on 100 odd disks.

I remember getting a pal at Cambridge University (nice fat pipe to the hosting
sites) to email the disk images as uuencoded files to me where I was working -
in 64Mb slices requiring tedious extraction and reconstruction. My employers
didn't really get the internet and even their email was on the X400 suite
rather than SMTP. Awful given that they were a major international computer
company.

I still think it's a shame that Linux missed their first big chance. At that
time Windows For Workgroups 3.11 was the de facto standard. Linux was a
massive distance ahead in most respect but didn't have the applications. It
kept that lead until NT 4.1 came out and it's only recently with the Ubuntu
distributions and the general move to web applications that I've started to be
hopeful that it can finally displace Windows.

Which is a shame because now that the technical advantages are diminished (or
maybe even surpassed) I no longer care.

~~~
dcminter
Oh and what I meant to say before I started rambling - I remember being super
impressed that my paperback copy of "Portable Unix" was larger than the disk
media (2 x 1.44Mb diskettes) that encompassed the Linux clone. In retrospect
it's startling that this was impressive!

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joblessjunkie
"Who I am and why I am here," despite being the first heading in the article,
is curiously unanswered.

It may seem immodest or obvious, but bloggers, please put your name
prominently on your blog posts, especially if the most common word is "I".

~~~
kahawe
With a bit of clicking around on the website, this should answer itself quite
easily:

Lars Wirzenius

<http://liw.fi/cv/>

~~~
aristidb
Actually, no clicking required: The name is in the sidebar. I did need a while
to find it there, though.

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prayag
To anyone who knows the Finns this seems exactly how a typical (and I am on
thin ice here for grossly generalizing a country of 5 million people, but let
me continue) Finn would talk. Self-deprecating, modest and humorous in a very
dry manner.

~~~
gaius
_After that, he spent a long time just reading netnews. Sorry, I mean of
course that he was debugging his terminal emulation code by reading netnews_

Brilliant :-)

------
tomjen3
For those of you who share my slow mental arithmetic, no 1998 isn't twenty
years ago -- you are not that old. Yet.

~~~
axiak
I think the point is that linux is 20 years old (1991), and these are
anecdotes from an earlier time in linux history. The headline isn't "Anectodes
from 20 years ago, 1998".

------
kahawe
> _For example, if the Hurd had been finished a few years ago_

Any minute now... I mean, even DNF made it eventually!!

