For those veteran linux people, what was it like back in 90s? I did see and hear of Unix systems being available for use but I did not see much apart from old versions of Debian in use.
Were they prominent in education like universities? Was it mainly a hobbyist thing at the time compared to the business needs of 98, 95 and classic mac?
I ask this because I found out that some PC games I owned were apparently also on Linux even in CD format from a firm named Loki.
It was a struggle. You went to buy some device and you had to check it was not one of those windows-only ones. Modems were particularly bad, for example.
You had to read the how-tos and figure things out. Mailing lists and newsgroups were the only places to find some help.
You had to find the shop willing to honour warranty on the parts and not on the whole system, as they had no knowledge of Linux at all. But once you found them, you were a recurring customer so they were actually happy. You might even have ended up showing them memtest86!
You would still be able to configure the kernel and be able to actually know some of those names, compilation would take several hours but it was a learning experience.
You could interact with very helpful kernel developers and get fixes to test.
You could have been the laughing stock of your circles of friends, but within you, you knew who’d have had the last laugh.
And yes, Loki games had some titles working on Linux natively, Railroad Tycoon was one. Too bad they were ahead of the times and didn’t last much.
compilation would take several hours but it was a learning experience.
the first time i put gentoo on a g3 imac back in 2004; it took 3 days to compile everything and the computer got so hot that it warmed up the entire room like a space heater. lol
Everything was harder back then - even when using Windows. But you had to be a real masochist to run Linux.
Computers were still quite new that most people had no real use for them beyond “work things”. Only nerds really used them for anything else. “Do you have an email address” isn’t a question you ask today.
“Kids these days” don’t realize how easy they have it when it comes to just general comparability. There weren’t a lot of standards yet and vendors had proprietary drivers and offered no support AT ALL for “lye nux”. You had to do a ton of research and fiddling to figure out if there was any support for your specific version of a specific chip used by any peripheral you used. And then to discover that you had to patch your kernel to add a driver that somebody had bodged together. So now you were running your own fun custom-kernel so you could get full-duplex rather than simplex audio! But it works!
Like - lets say today you want to buy an external IDE drive controller to plug in some old drives to for backup. You to to Amazon, search “USB external IDE enclosure” and buy the cheapest one you find. It probably works unless it’s defective. In '95 USB and Firewire were in their infancy so you would probably buy a serial or parallel port device. You would need to find whether Linux supported the specific version of the thing you wanted to buy, what tools there would be for it, etc. There was no standard “bulk storage device” driver that you could rely on or hope the vendor would implement. Even if you were an early adopter and got a USB or Firewire device it might have some “basic” functionality that works with OSS drivers but you couldn’t use all of it.
Vendors back then also shipped their own software with things, not just drivers. It was always just the absolute worst crap that was buggy as shit. But it would do a lot of the heavy lifting in working with their device. Like any Creative Labs audio player you wanted to get working. Sure it used USB but it didn’t just mount as storage device, you needed to use the worst GUI ever put before mankind to use it (under Windows). Under Linux you had to find a specific tool that would support pushing/pulling media from it. These days it would just mount as a drive automatically and you’d use standard desktop tools to interact with it.
Even with DOS/Windows you’d buy a game and as you came home from the store with it in a box wonder “will this work on my computer and how long will I need to mess with it?” I had to configure a specific CD-ROM driver to be used by DOS just to run Tie Fighter vs. X-Wing for example. Had a special boot floppy just for that game since that driver didn’t work with literally anything else I had.
Hardware just generally didn’t “auto configure”. “Plug 'n Play” was still very much in its infancy and you often had to manually configure hardware and install special drivers just for a particular card or peripheral.
IRQ 7 DMA 220. I probably just triggered some folks. If you were setting up a “Sound Blaster or compatible” then you had to know what interrupt it used (7) and what address it was on on the direct-memory bus (220). And you hoped there wasn’t a conflict with something else. If there was then there would be a DIP switch you could use to change the base memory address or IRQ from the default. But you were telling your software where to find the card.
USB was a f’ing game changer for peripherals. Serial and parallel ports were so slow and obnoxious to use. Before that there was no real way to “probe” the bus to discover what was there unless you knew exactly what you were looking for (there’s no
lsusbfor serial ports). So you just guessed at the driver you need and “modprob foo” hoping it worked.It’s amazing what 20ish years of just developing standards has done.
If you want a taste of that world I highly recommend LGR on YouTube. He’s mostly Windows focused but look for videos where he tries out “oddware” to see how often he has trouble getting things to work on period hardware using the vendor-supplied software even. Then multiply that by 100x for Linux. :-)
I was reading your wall of text chomping at the bit to complain about IRQs and dip switches but you covered even that!
Oh wait, you didn’t include having a math coprocessor daughter boards! I barely remember them but remember my dad building computers with them.
I kinda wish I was a teen when the first computer kits were coming out. And phone phreaking.
I remember buying a bunch of old HP ISA 100Mbit NICs to turn an old computer into a router/server combo. Naive as I was I put them all in and nothing worked. Turns out they were all configured to use the same IRQ (since they likely came from independent machines), and that caused them to overwrite each others settings… including the MAC adress. Thankfully I found some nice hacker that worked with these cards before and published a little C tool to rewrite their EEPROMs. I contacted him if he sees a chance to resurrect the cards and that saint indeed hacked the necessary features into his tool so I could rewrite the MAC adresses, change the IRQ one by one and ended up with a working network. Good times.
Ah, yes, Linux around the turn of the century. Let’s see…
GPU acceleration? In your dreams. Only some cards had drivers, and there were more than 2 GPU manufacturers back then, too… We had ATi, nVidia, 3dfx, Cirrus, Matrox, Via, Intel… and almost everyone held their driver source cards close to their chest.
Modems? Not if they were “winmodems”, which had no hardware controller, the CPU and the Windows driver (which was always super proprietary) did all the hard work.
Sound? AC’97 software audio was out of the question. See above. You had to find a sound blaster card if you wanted to get audio to work right.
So, you know how modern linux has software packages? Well, back then, we had Slackware, and it compiled everything gentoo style back then. In addition, everyone had a hardon for " compiling from source is better"… so your single core Pentium II had to take its time compiling on a UDMA66-connected hard drive, constrained with 32 or 64 MB RAM. Updating was an overnight procedure.
RedHat and Debian were godsends for people who didn’t want to waste their time compiling… which unfortinately was more common even so, because a lot of software was source only.
Oh, and then MP3 support was ripped out of RedHat in Version 9 iirc, the last version before they split it into RHEL and Fedora. RIP music.
As for Linux on a Mac, there was Yellowdog, which supported the PPC iMacs and such. It was decently good, but I had to write my own x11 monitor settings file (which I still have on a server somewhere, shockingly, I should throw it on github or somewhere) to get the screen to line up and work right.
Basically, be glad Linux has gone from the “spend a considerable amount of time and have programming / underhood linux knowledge to get it working” to “insert stick, install os, start using it” we have now.
Slackware and Red Hat were the two distros in use in the mid 90s.
My local city used proper UNIX, and my university had
IRIXworkstationsSPARCstations and SunOS servers. We used Linux at my ISP to handle modem pools and web/mail/news servers. In the early 2000s we had Linux labs, and Linux clusters to work on.Linux on the desktop was a bit painful. There were no modules. Kernels had to fit into main memory. So you’d roll your own kernel with just the drivers you needed. XFree86 was tricky to configure with timings for your CRT monitors. If done wrong, you could break your monitor.
I used FVWM2 and Enlightenment for many years. I miss Enlightenment.
I used Enlightenment on Arch Linux for a year, in 2020-21. The PC had 4G ram and an HDD, Enlightenment was blazing fast. I could type enlightenment_start to a tty and reach a Wayland desktop under a second with 250M ram used total. E is still alive and kicking.
SGI workstations had the best GUI. That shit looked straight out of Hollywood
If done wrong, you could break your monitor.
You mean your graphic drivers, right? not your actual hardware?
(edit: oh no)
No. The wrong timing parameters could definitively break your hardware.
You could buy box copies of the original suse Linux that had manuals in the box the size of a TI graphing calculator manual.
Once you got X working everything else was cake by comparison.
Hearing your monitor squeal when you got the modelines wrong was fun.
Could you please elaborate? I’ve no idea what that sentence means, so it sounds really wild to me 😅
CRT monitors internally use an electron gun which just fires electrons at the phosporous screen (from, the back, obviously, and the whole assembly is one big vacuum chamber with the phosporous screen at the front and the electron gun at the back) using magnets to twist the eletcron stream left/right and up/down.
In practice the way it was used was to point it to the start of a line were it would start moving to the other side, then after a few clock ticks start sending the line data and then after as many clock ticks as there were points on the line, stop for a few ticks and then swipe it to the start of the next line (and there was a wait period for this too).
Back in those days, when configuring X you actually configured all this in a text file, low level (literally the clock frequency, total lines, total points per line, empty lines before sending data - top of the screen - and after sending data as well as OFF ticks from start of line before sending data and after sending data) for each resolution you wanted to have.
All this let you defined your own resolutions and even shift the whole image horizontally or vertically to your hearts content (well, there were limitations on things like the min and max supported clock frequency of the monitor and such). All that freedom also meant that you could exceed the capabilities of the monitor and even break it.
Sounds pretty cool, thanks for sharing!
This was me, you’re talking about me. 😂 In the 90’s Linux was barely getting started but slackware was probably the main distro everyone was focused on. That was the first one I ran across. This was probably late 90’s, I don’t remember when slack first came about though.
By the time the 2000’s came around, it was basically a normal thing for people in college to have used or at least tried. Linux was in the vernacular, text books had references to it, and the famous lawsuit from SCO v IBM was in full swing. There were distro choices for days, including Gentoo which I spent literally a week getting everything compiled on an old Pentium only for it to not support some of the hardware and refuse to boot.
There was a company I believe called VA Linux that declared that year to be the year of the Linux desktop. My memory might be faulty on this one.
Loki gaming was a company that specialized in porting games to Linux, and they did a good job at it but couldn’t make money. I remember being super excited about them and did buy a few games. I was broke too so that was a real splurge for me. I feel like they launched in the 90’s (late) and crashed in the early 2000’s.
the first contact i had with linux back in mid-90’s brazil was with my isp’s login terminal, which displayed some arcane text reading “red hat linux version x.x”. after that, during my father’s final years working in bank of brazil he had to deal with cobra’s homemade distro in his workstations (cobra had developed an unix in the 80s that run on m68k’s, so no surprises here). it was an absolutely esoteric system to those who only knew the dos/windows 3.11 duo, since w95 only arrived in our country in numbers only in 96. the thing really caught on during the early to mid-2000’s, with faster and cheaper adsl connections, and with them, abundant knowledge and downloads available to any script kid.
I used it in a university course in '95, not sure what distro, but customising your shell prompt, and setting automatic timed updates for the wallpaper in tvwm certainly felt like the future. Different and electric.
We would play the linux shareware first release of quake in 12-16 player. Hiding the executable by renaming it ekauq… didn’t work, still got removed from our directories.
There were installfests at the local LUG, which were a fun way to share tips and help others.
One Linux support business existed in our town in the 90s, installing and fixing Linux boxen for businesses. Mostly home/hobby use though.
Slashdot.org was covering the majority of Linux news. Either MS FUD or the nonsense SCO lawsuit, amongst all the positive advances.
Linux conferences were a fun way to make it more real and see many of the big names behind the movement and technologies.
Installed RedHat 4 or 5.1 around 98 and then found the power of Debian. Currently running Trisquel GNU/Linux because it is a fully libre distro with no proprietary blobs or other obfuscated parts.
Many thanks to RMS and all FLOSS contributors, there is such an incredible spectrum of tools available for free use. It has been great to see the progression and expansion over the decades.
I got a copy of Turbolinux 6 (released in 2000) from somebody at a Hamfest, but couldn’t get it to install and run.
Two years later, I was successful in running Debian and Gentoo.
Driver support was so dicey. If you had anything even remotely not mainstream, you would be compiling your own video driver, or network driver, or basically left to figure it out for any other peripheral. So many devices like scanners and very early webcams just claimed zero Linux support at all, but you could at times find someone else’s project that might work.
I tried to switch to Linux as a desktop system several times in the late 90s but kept going back to windows because hardware support just wasn’t there yet.
My community college(1997) had a Suse linux computer lab that I learned on. It was mostly used as a networking/server and programming platform.
Loki was the leading porting developer at the time.
In the early 90s all the “cool kids” (for a techie definition of “cool”, i.e. hackers) at my University (a Technical one in Portugal with all the best STEM degrees in the country) used Linux - it was actually a common thing for people to install it in the PCs of our shared computer room.
Later in that decade it was already normal for it to be used in professional environments for anything serving web pages (static or dynamic) along with Apache: Windows + IIS already had a lower fraction of that Market than Linux + Apache.
If I remember it correctly in the late 90s RedHat started providing their Enterprise Version with things like Support Contracts - so beloved by the Corporates who wanted guarantees that if their systems broke the supplier would fix them - which did a lot to boost Linux use on the backend for non-Tech but IT heavy industries.
I would say this was the start of the trend that would ultimately result in Linux dominating on the server-side.
I have to say, as a Linux fan in the 90’s it was very cool to see Linux eating the whole server space, replacing older Unix while Microsoft tried desperately to grow Windows on the server market.
I was already a dev in a small IT consultancy by the end of the decade, and having ended up as “one of the guys you go to for web-based interfaces”, I did my bit pushing Linux as a solution, though I still had to use IIS on one or two projects (even had to use Oracle Web Application Server once), mainly because clients trusted Microsoft (basically any large software vendor, such as Microsoft, IBM or Oracle) but did not yet trust Linux.
That’s why I noticed the difference that Red Hat with their Enterprise version and Support Plans did on the acceptability of Linux.
I started playing with Linux in the late 90s while I was in grad school. Slackware 3.x. I think I might have tried one or two others, but since I was somewhat familiar with Unix, Slackware was the easiest for me to learn.
I got them via CD ROMs; I’m pretty sure they came with a book on Linux (I think it included several distributions on CDs). I don’t think I have that book any more; I likely got rid of it long ago as it was badly out of date. But my memory is that it was published by Que, a publisher that I had good experience with on other topics. (dBase III, for example) I’m pretty sure it was this one…leave it to Amazon to still have it.
I recall recompiling kernel because it was “so much faster” (I cringe at myself now for thinking that - it probably wasn’t even true on my Pentium 133 machines). I also remember spending time trying to get X-windows configured, but I was successful. I think I was using fvwm95 window manager, a Windows-like experience. I started using Linux essentially full time pretty quickly.
A few times I got frustrated with Linux and tried to switch back to Windows, but the headaches of Windows always quickly drove me back to Linux. Linux is not perfect, but Windows is even worse.
I tried slackwear in '94. Getting it running was no big deal, but I had zero experience and documentation / help guides were thin. Installing applications or getting peripherals to work was prohibitively difficult without having a pretty decent amount of knowledge about it.
My high school had a rather large dose/novell Network but there was no internet yet. BBS’s were a thing and you could get a lot of installers and information from them. But they were all running in dos for the most part
My college had a VAX, it was more or less there just to get email and power a metric ass load of terminals in the library for research purposes. They really tried to keep you out of the CLI, everything was menued. I figured out that you could go for it to a South African University about seven times in a row and it would explode and give you a telnet session, but even then I wasn’t really working with an OS shell. The school had a computer lab. It was all Windows 3 and Novell, No internet for the longest time.
My ISP had options to dial up into a terminal session. My home dial up line was awful. Trying to FTP over PPP was a fool’s errand. I started getting used to connecting to my ISP and FTPing files down to their local node on with their T1 and then switching over to z modem to download the files to my house with the ability to auto restart on failure.
I didn’t try to run a Linux based OS again until Gnome came out.
