The early days of Linux (2023)
136 comments
·March 2, 2025linuxhansl
api
My first net connection was using slirp via a shell account. Slirp was a CSLIP emulator that ran in user space on the shell box on the remote side.
Back in those days multi user shell machines were quite common and some of the first ISPs offered Internet access that way.
Mine was an ISP called Internet Access Cincinnati that gave each user shell on a Sun Sparc 10 running SunOS (pre-Solaris). You also got POP e-mail and a -username home folder accessible via web.
jks
Slirp lives on in QEMU and container engines: https://github.com/rootless-containers/slirp4netns
jabl
Ha, Running slirp in the ISP shell box was also how I first got beyond bbs'ed onto the wild west of the internet.
Also getting online was one of my first motivations for using Linux, as the Trumpet winsock networking library for Windows 3.1 was terrible and crashed the entire computer all the time.
qwertox
It's odd how Linux has become the only stable thing in this world. You turn it on and you know that over time it will only become better without any bad intentions.
xtracto
This is so important to me on this day and age. Most new technology and OS seem to have an agenda. They want to "push" me to do things: buy an iPhone, buy an office subscription , etc. Using Linux is a breath of fresh air in that respect for me. I just want my toaster tu toast bread. I don't want it to tell me what bread should I buy.
sgarland
This is why I dislike Ubuntu – I don't like Snaps, and I don't want them to be considered the default.
alt227
But we ALL want our toasters to ask us if we want any toast
jmclnx
>I just want my toaster
I think I heard the NetBSD toaster is out of support :(
stevekemp
I do remember there was some point in the mid/late 90s where I had to do a lot of research before buying [desktop] computers and hardware - would this specific network card be supported? Would this graphics card work with X11? etc. Maybe it was trauma and paranoia from the WinModems of the day, that were never going to work.
But by the early 2000s we seemed to switch to a world where I just assumed Linux would support my new hardware, be it a used Zip-drive, a web-cam, or whatever.
These days I'm the same. I fearlessly buy random motherboards, and hardware toys, and just assume they work. So far I've been lucky, but it is a real testament to the driver-developers. The lone developer who makes one pull-request against the kernel solely to add the magic numbers to recognize yet another kind of SD-card, or similar. Really benefits us all, even if they never do another thing.
kqr
Even in the mid--late '00s I had to make careful purchases of things like wifi, or be stuck manually patching and compiling half-working drivers.
hnlmorg
Bluetooth was another pain point.
But by and large, thing did still just work.
Around that same era Windows wasn’t exactly problem free with device drivers either. A fresh install on random hardware would often require hunting down Windows drivers online. Though of course those drivers did always existed because of Windows’ market share.
stevekemp
I spent many years using 10BaseT and then later wired ethernet, which meant I avoided WiFi for the longest time.
Now you reminded me that I bought a wifi dongle around 2012/2013 and ended up having to return it because I couldn't get it to work. But the very next one I bought as a replacement worked first time. So perhaps I'm having rose-tinted memories!
noisy_boy
ndiswrapper anyone?
stmw
Oh, the dreaded WinModems! And other Linux-incompatible hardware. To help with this research of which hardware would work there were several dedicates sites that attempted to collect info from Linux users on which drivers to use, etc. It's all so much easier now.
wejick
Oh that softmodem that only worked on windows.
Philpax
Just as long as you don't buy NVIDIA for your Linux desktop!
bigstrat2003
I've had multiple Nvidia cards across multiple installs of Linux, never had an issue once. Just install the Nvidia driver and it works. IMO the supposed problems of using Nvidia on Linux are wildly overblown.
pimeys
The author of nouveau is working for NVIDIA now. And redhat is writing their nova driver to the mainstream. I really wish this would mean using NVIDIA is going to be a breeze in the near future.
Until that I'll buy AMD.
gjvc
"The lone developer who makes one pull-request against the kernel solely to add the magic numbers to recognize yet another kind of SD-card, or similar. Really benefits us all, even if they never do another thing."
Very much so -- many drops form a torrent.
DoingIsLearning
Every well can be poisoned. Linux relies on people's values and people's skills. Neither of which are immune to degradation over time.
Much like the post world war civil society, economic and diplomatic development was an exception in Human history.
Assuming the reality we have will remain forever without protection or constant maintenance effort is dangerous.
vednig
> Every well can be poisoned. Linux relies on people's values and people's skills. Neither of which are immune to degradation over time.
It's rather the opposite, combined with moral stance of Linus and it's core committee itself that has managed to kept Linux on this track so far.
hnlmorg
The kernel is only a small part of the overall Linux ecosystem.
These days even GNU is a small part.
systemd, Wayland, Xorg, PulseAudio, CUPS, KDE, Gnome, etc are all maintained outside of Linus and GNUs governance.
What FOSS operating systems (and not even Linux specifically) offers is freedom to choose. But the effort of using some alternatives can be significant.
So I wouldn’t say Linux is immune to having its “well poisoned” because if Linus.
llm_trw
Linus isn't a renewable resource unfortunately.
pjmlp
All of us aren't going to stay forever on the planet, and whoever replaces Linus and the core committee has their own set of values, and goals for the project, there are zero garantees that everything stays the same no matter what.
samiv
And after every update there's something new that is broken. I suppose you mean "stable" as in "you can count on something always breaking".
userbinator
Corporate interests have already seeped into Linux.
II2II
Thankfully most of the corporate interests that have already seeped into Linux have been a net positive. If corporations remember the lessons of the 1990's, it will remain that way.
(In the 1990's businesses either had to develop and maintain their own operating system, or license it from someone else. Both routes are expensive. There were also collaborative efforts for larger operating systems, none of which seemed to reach positive conclusions since the businesses who owned the rights to the operating systems were ultimately in direct competition with each other. For whatever reason, the open source collaborative model used by Linux has been successful. In all probability it is because nobody "owns" Linux in the conventional sense.)
abenga
Corporate interests are not bad per se, you would have to point to something nefarious that it has led to. Most people seem to think corporate interest in Linux has made it better by raising the level of investment to the extent that we can use it on most commodity hardware.
t43562
On the minus side of the equation, large controversial changes, more often outside the kernel but still important nevertheless, do get pushed through by people who are employed at important companies.
If your fulltime job is Linux it does give you an ability to influence what happens that others who are earning their daily bread some other way lack. You can use that ability to ride over some objections.
For some people the goal of Linux is to become the world's OS. I used to think this but I realise now that if it did, then it would become static and conformist. This is because the experience of using it would have to be stable and common so that all the users who don't care about Linux per se wouldn't have to keep relearning how to use it or at least would only need to relearn 1 way. So there would have to be the world linux distro, probably run by some bullying company that would keep app developers, hardware vendors in line.
We'd be complaining about it like we might about MS or Apple. I like Linux for the wrong reason - I like it because there's so much choice. Simplicity is about eliminating choice.
exe34
I worry that it's a Linus thing - he still has to step in and call for order now and again. I don't know for sure if it will remain on the trajectory of always getting better when he retires.
cnt-dracula
I think there was a discussion regarding this last year where linus was saying that they are already thinking of who will call shots after him so I think even though right now it's very much a linus thing, I think they are already prepared for the next person to lead it in case we ever need it
api
It’s the right mix of open source but with so many huge well resourced users that it’s in everyone’s interest to improve it. It’s like in this specific case the tragedy of the commons works backward.
We should study the social and economic dynamics and game theory of this and try to replicate it. Someone should do a whole game theory Ph.D thesis on Linux and how it manifests an un-tragedy of the commons.
klysm
It’s a weird feeling to be young enough to never have experienced a world without Linux, but be close enough in time to its creation that many of the people involved are still around. My entire professional career has mostly revolved around it in some capacity. My entire life even since age like 12? It’s pretty crazy to think about the impact it has had on my life
weinzierl
I feel similar for Computer Science as a whole field. It's weird to think that many of its founding fathers were still during a significant portion of my life.
Claude Shannon 2001
Edsger Dijkstra 2012
John McCarthy 2011
Niklaus Wirth 2024
Konrad Zuse 1995
Alonzo Church 1995
Jim Gray 2007/2012
Grace Hopper 1992
Even Alan Turing could still have been alive during my lifetime hadn't he been murdered.
Friedrich L. Baur, who died in 2015, still had an office at my university when I studied there and I often passed by, saw his name plate, and wondered if this was all real.
Luckily Donald Knuth is still around.
neontomo
Alan Turing took his own life on purpose or by accident, he wasn't murdered
throw-qqqqq
Many believe his “chemical castration” (forced hormone therapy) caused depression first, suicide later.
Some also believe he was poisoned.
I assume that is where the “murder” comes from.
flohofwoe
If you read up on how the UK government treated him after the war, it was essentially murder even if they didn't outright execute him.
Philpax
And what led him to take his own life?
ahazred8ta
Note the classic "Linux is a 10 year old boy" ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7ozaFbqg00
kernal
I know why you mean. It’s hard to imagine a world without the iPhone.
jasoneckert
I remember the early days of Linux well. There was quite a bit of interest for it at the University of Waterloo in the mid 90s, but there was also a lot of talk of issues getting it to install, or getting it to run stably on certain systems (albeit not uncommon for any OS at the time). Those were the days of having to know how to compile your own kernel and fight with XFree86.
Linux distributions like Red Hat really squashed those concerns within a short time and made things much easier on all fronts. Their documentation was also excellent.
By the late 1990s, Red Hat was as common as Solaris, AIX, and IRIX at the university, but most still considered it inferior to Solaris. And now, RHEL is the main *nix system used there (a few use Debian).
mananaysiempre
Tried installing Solaris in a VM recently, and the installer immediately and starkly brought back memories of the one from a Red Hat derivative I didn’t realize I even remembered. I’m not old enough to have been involved with commercial Unices at the time, but even looking back it appears that Red Hat knew very clearly who they were aiming at.
ttyprintk
I think this is consistent with big universities at the time. I remember when Alpha was becoming discontinued, reinstalling RedHat on those did give Linux a boost as a daily driver for researchers.
jasoneckert
Linux definitely breathed life into that great platform. I still have an Alpha Personal Workstation 600au in my basement running Red Hat from that time period.
cbm-vic-20
I had a Jensen (DECpc AXP 150) and an Alpha Multia; there were the first targets for Windows NT 3.51 on Alpha, but I had early Alpha Linux running on them. These might still be buried in the basement of my parents' house. Not as cool as the OSF/1-based DECserver 2100 "Sable" at work. I loved that machine.
ajross
> Those were the days of having to know how to compile your own kernel and fight with XFree86.
It was the XF86Config modeline HOWTO that taught me how a CRT controller works.
imiric
> More importantly for the future success of Linux was that the X11 system was ported to it, making 1992 the year of the Linux desktop.
I'm glad that's finally settled. :)
Great read!
infp_arborist
For the biggest part of my life it seemed that all these technical accomplishments were the work of untouchable geniuses, but reading this story is also very telling about the value of long-term friendship and financial/societal stability to support each other's explorations.
qingcharles
TIL: Linus is a Swedish speaking Finn; and those are a thing.
This sound has lived rent-free in my head since 1994:
stmw
Indeed, he is part of the Swedish minority in Finland... I thought everyone (on HN) already knew that?
emmelaich
Many Fins can speak Swedish. Around 10pc? It is an official language.
When I met Linus T in 1994/5 I asked why he spoke Swedish and not Finnish and he rolled his eyes. Was so sick of the question even then.
pimeys
Yeah. Speaking swedish especially in the coastal area of Finland is quite common. My father in law mixes both languages together in a funny way in his talk. It's kind of funny, but also pretty common among the Finnish-Swedes...
qingcharles
Nope! Slipped me by and I'm a language nerd who literally worked for Nokia (only one trip to the mothership though) and spent my teens deep in the Finnish demoscene and the rest of the 90s knee-deep in Linux.
wolfi1
classic, was on the search for it. I can remember, there was a file on the ftp sites called linus.au (the original I presume, since .ogg hasn't been invented at the time), there was a non-english version as well (finnish?). glad it survived somehow. thank you for the link
LorenDB
Also worth a read: Just for Fun
https://www.amazon.com/Just-Fun-Story-Accidental-Revolutiona...
juhanakristian
Read this about ten years ago. Pretty short read but highly recommended.
susam
> The first Linux distribution was also started in 1992: Softlanding Linux System or SLS. The next year, SLS morphed into Slackware, which inspired Ian Murdock to start Debian in 1993, in order to explore a more community-based development structure. A few other distributions would follow in the years to come.
And follow they did! The Great Linux Distribution Timeline at <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Di...> presents an impressive graph of the countless distributions that descended from Slackware, Debian, etc. This graph is still actively maintained by the community here: <https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline>.
udev4096
There's this amazing documentary on linux, from 2003. It's called Revolution OS. Highly recommended! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0RYQVkQmWU
rixed
I second that. The best documentary I've ever seen about Linux and GNU.
linsomniac
One thing I often think about in the early days of Linux is it's competitors. The article mentions "commercial Unix was so expensive it was easier to write your own". Which is largely true.
However there is also Coherent Unix. I remember adverts for it as the full back page of so many magazines of the day, for $99. I always was on the fence about buying it. One of the big drawbacks of Coherent was that it didn't have any networking.
Then, Linux came out, and it was shockingly shortly after that that Linux surpassed Coherent, and Coherent vanished seemingly overnight.
arp242
Reading a review from Dec 1990[1], it doesn't seem that brilliant:
"Coherent remains true to Unix's roots and eschews local area networking, graphical user interfaces, menus, mice, and many of the other amenities that present-day DOS users and Unix users have come to expect of modern software."
It goes on to describe that "learning Unix from Coherent would be a bumpy road" and "nor could you realistically use Coherent to automate a small business".
Coherent was closed-source, so you couldn't take an imperfect incomplete system like Linux and help improve it. Linux attracted contributors early on not because Linux at the time was so great, but because people liked to work on this kind of thing.
$99 is ~$230 today. I know software used to be a lot more expensive in general (e.g. $25 for PKZIP in the late 80s), but $230 for a bare-bones OS for playing around is only "cheap" relative to Enterprise Unix™® pricing.
[1]: https://books.google.ie/books?id=JZxkO0PpksUC&pg=PT61&redir_...
ForTheKidz
Did it not have some kind of ncurses functionality? So much of what I see about software from the eighties (mostly via movies) seems operable with just an unnetworked unix terminal.
jmclnx
>However there is also Coherent Unix.
I was a customer and it was very good, I use to use kermit to dial into a Sun System at work and it would call me back so I would avoid charges. That was to get USENET and general Internet access. Fun times. It is too bad they had to fold, be to be honest by 1995 the writting was on the wall,
When they folded, I went to Slackware, which I still use. Back then, Linux was changing almost daily.
Coherent had one thing that Linux could not do, but via USENET I asked and someone supplied a patch for me within days. It would allow me to use 2 monitors with 2 cards on my 386sx, a BW and a VGA just like what Coherent was able to do.
People were far more accessible back then until the fortune 500 companies got involved in the 2000s.
ahartmetz
Yes, people were really accessible when the community was small. I remember calling, by phone, some (also German) guy about a printer problem - my Samsung printer's Epson emulation apparently wasn't good enough for my distro's Epson driver. It must have been in '98 or '99. He was either the printer guy at S.u.S.E. (name at the time) or maintaining a relevant driver. We chatted for about an hour and I remember being impressed by how willing to engage he was and by his collection of workstation-class computers. But my printer problem remained unsolved :D
OsrsNeedsf2P
As a burnt out contributor, my first couple chats debugging for users were beautiful. But then they just kept coming and coming in droves upon droves and I had to set up a wall to let me focus on the work, which soured my relationship with users, which became an ever-increasing stress...
Bless those contributors who were able to keep it up. They're the ones who should have Big Tech salaries, not those of us who gave up and sold our souls to Ad tech.
stmw
This is a really important difference
atombender
Also, the BSDs were emerging around the same time, in particular 386BSD [1]. Linus was famously quoted as saying that if it had been available in the early days, he would probably never have made Linux [2].
The first release of 386BSD was in 1992, so we are talking about a short time window of 1-2 years here. And of course FreeBSD and NetBSD forked from it shortly after that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD
[2] https://www.antman.se/abc-klubben/linux/linuxdoc/linus.html
rjsw
I ran 386/ix [1] on a i386 PC from 1987, switched to 386BSD 0.1 in late 1992, then FreeBSD sometime in 1993.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Systems_Corporatio...
xtracto
I remember installing FreeBSD in 1994. Ot was soooo cool to me as a 13 year old to startx and have a Unix like environment in my computer. I feel freebsd was superior to Linux,but as with other things, apps availability made the win
stmw
Indeed, this is really interesting question about Linux and Linus in the early days - it obviously wasn't just the price of the alternatives or the overall concept of ~Unix-on-x86 - there was something different about Linus Torvalds' approach even early on, and one can see glimpses of it in these early stories.
emmelaich
Hate to say but Microsoft's Xenix was so fast on a i386. Did a lot of scientific programming on it in 1991/2.
icedchai
Yep! I remember that time. I ran Coherent briefly (1991 - 1992 or so) before getting into early Linux distros like SLS.
dang
Discussed at the time (of the article):
The early days of Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35557848 - April 2023 (224 comments)
Fun. I started using Linux at 0.98 (forgot the patch level), in 1992.
Had a modem and connected to a lot of bulletin boards. I felt very much a like "WarGames" hero, calling phone numbers and all :)
I still remember the day when I used ppp to connect to the actual Internet for the first time. After a lot of trial and error, I finally pinged www.linux.org, and it resolved the hostname and returned the ping. I was silent first, and all I could say then was "whoa".
Oh fun times. :)