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.
Well, XFree86 ( before Xorg and before KMS ) was an adventure. I spent hours guessing the vertical and horizontal frequencies of my monitor trying to get decent resolutions.
Other than that, Linux was way more work but “felt” powerful relative to OS options of the time. Windows was still crashy. The five of us that used OS/2 hated that it still had a lot of 16 bit under the hood. Linux was pure 32 bit.
Later in the 90’s, you could run a handful of Windows apps on Linux and they seemed to run better on Linux. For example, file system operations were dramatically faster.
And Linux was improving incredibly rapidly so it felt inevitable that it would outpace everything else.
The reality though was that it was super limited and a pain in the ass. “Normal” people would never have put up with it. It did not run anything you wanted it to ( if you had apps you liked on Mac, Windows, OS/2, Amiga, NeXTstep, BeOS, or whatever else you were using ( there were of potential options at the time ). But even for the pure UNIX and POSIX stuff, it was hard.
Obviously installation was technical and complex. And everything was a hodge-podge of independently developed software. “Usability” was not a thing. Ubuntu was not release until 2004.
Linux back then was a lot of hitting FTP sites to download software that you would build yourself from source. Stuff could be anywhere on the Internet and your connection was probably slow. And it was dependency hell so you would be building a lot of software just to be able to build the software you want. And there was a decent chance that applications would disagree about what dependencies they needed ( like versions ). Or the config files would be expected in a different location. Or the build system could not find the required libraries because they were not where the Makefile was looking for them.
Linux in the 90’s had no package management. This is maybe the biggest difference between Linux then and Linux now. When package management finally arrived, it came in two stages. First, came packages but you were still grabbing them individually from FTP. Second came the package manager which handled dependencies and retrieval.
The most popular Linux in the mid to late 90’s was Red Hat. This was before RHEL and before Fedora. There was just “Red Hat Linux”. Red Hat featured RPMs ( packages ) but you were still installing them and any required dependencies yourself at the command line. YUM ( precursor to NRF ) was not added until Fedora Core 1 was release in 2003!
APT ( apt-get ) was not added to Debian until 1998.
And all of this meant that every Linux system ( not distro — individual computer ) was a unique snowflake. No two were alike. So bundling binary software to work on “Linux” was a real horror-show. People like Loki gave it a good run but I cannot imagine the pain they went through. To make matters worse, the Linux “community” was almost entirely people that had self-selected to give up pre-packaged software and to trade sweat-equity for paying for stuff. Getting large number of people to give you money for software was hard. I mean, as far as we have come, that is still harder on Linux than on Windows or macOS.
You can download early Debian or Red Hat distros today if you want to experience it for yourself. That said, even the world of hardware has changed. You will probably not be wrestling IRQs to get sound or networking running on modern hardware or in a VM. Your BIOS will probably not be buggy. You will have VESA at least and not be stuck on VGA. But all of that was just “computing” in the 90’s and the Windows crowd had the same problems.
One 90s hardware quirk was “Windows” printers or modems though where the firmware was half implanted in Windows drivers. This was because the hardware was too limited or too dumb to work on its own and to save money your computer would do some of the work. Good luck having Linux support for those though.
Even without trying old distros, just try to go a few days on you current Linux distro without using apt, nrf, pacman, zypper, the GUI App Store, or what have you. Imagine never being able to use those tools again. What would that be like?
Finally, on my much, much slower 90’s PC, I compiled my own kernel all the time. Honestly multiple times per month I would guess. Compiling new kernels was a significant fraction of where my computing resources went at the time. I cannot remember the last time I compiled a kernel.
It was a different world.
When Linus from LTT tried Linux not that long ago ( he wanted to game ), he commented that he felt like he was playing “with” his computer instead of playing “on” his computer. That comment still describes Linux to some extent but it really, really captures Linux in the 90’s.
It was kind of an upstart thing and people were trying to find ways to monetize it.
My first Linux was Red Hat on a 486 in 1998 and it was different than I was used to. I was a kid who didn’t know how to startx so I just emailed a developer using pine and they helped me figure out and choose a window manager. Nobody even got mad at this barely teenager just emailing dumb questions. I got lost with fvwm95 and afterstep. I tried every window manager, mlvwm, qvwm, IceWM, etc but ended up liking blackbox the most. I had 12MB of RAM on my first Linux system, 1MB of vram and 256 colors. We were all sarcastic in a cringe, adolescent way but everyone was friendly and helpful.
There was this fascination with monkeys in pop culture, but not real monkeys --chimps and gorillas. People would throw monkey in their username or in some random nu-metal song for some reason. There were monkeys you could download for your desktop. There was this thing by PC gamer called coconut monkey. I don’t know what that’s all about. And anyway I associate this period with the foot logo of Gnome, which was unprofessional but that was the point. Also, gimp was a funny name for an app (its cringe today), and PAN stood for pimp ass news.
I discovered Slashdot and Freshmeat and Sourceforge and kuro5hin. Usenet groups were great back then. So was irc. I trolled Slashdot and got negative karma and for the next 15 years before we all moved to SoylentNews, my comments started at -1.
Nobody knew how to pronounce Linux. Some people said Line-X because his name was Linus like on Charlie Brown, and some people said Leenucks.
At some point it became a corporate thing and the term Linux was everywhere. Randomly on magazine covers. There was also this divide, almost marketing driven, it seemed that people who liked warez and whatever started to love Microsoft and shit on Linux. So gamers especially started to shit talk and that’s the first time that being a computer nerd wasn’t like this unifying concept, there was an us versus them divide. People who could compile code they wrote and who were genuinely curious versus people who just wanted to download a bunch of shit and show you how big their start menu was and play games. I think this divide still exists.
There was a bunch of commercial software for Linux too. Metro-X, Accelerated X, Motif, Applixware, Star Office. Descent 3. One of the Quakes. Motif, the toolkit, looked amazing. I thought CDE with themes was the coolest looking thing ever. But I couldn’t afford CDE so I used XFce which was an XForms knockoff. And then enlightenment came along and pushed the boundaries of what we thought a desktop would be. Also, I was able to drag console windows with transparency on that 486 on e16.
Debian kind of had an elitist community and talked down to people so I never used it. I liked Slackware the most and spent a weekend downloading the floppies over a dialup connection. That led to me discovering FreeBSD in 1999, which I stuck with for almost a decade.
Later, a comp sci student, I didn’t see Linux at university in the labs. It was Solaris and macOS in the mid 2000s. Eventually, the Solaris computers were shut down and replaced with more Macs.
My girlfriend’s Windows ME computer was so full of spyware so I installed SuSE with KDE on it for her in her dorm. And she was able to do her papers in AbiWord. And 20+ years later we are married and it all worked out.
I finally switched to Debian stable about 4 years ago and have no complaints. It’s a lot easier now.
Edit: A couple more things: I started using Linux because I was very poor and it was free and Windows 95 was a mess on my system. I mean dirt roads and no water for long periods of time. My 486 in 1998 was sort of old already and it came with 8mb of RAM as a hand me down in 1995, but I was dumpster diving outside a community college when I was 12 and found an IBM PS/2 and stole the 30 pin SIMMs out of it. And one of them worked in my 486 computer so I ended up with 12mb of RAM. I overclocked it to 100mhz. That 486 got me through high school and into college where I ended up with an AMD system with a pirated Thai RM233 Windows 2000. But I went back to FreeBSD because I needed a compiler. So that kind of knowledge was useful and now that I have a good career from what I learned, I have donated a lot of money over the years to different projects. Also I make sure my kids have only ever known Linux and Gnome and it works fine for them.
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.
LoL!!! IRQ 5 DMA 220 for me. Had to manually adjust the jumper on the sound card.
Fucking hell…
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 😅
Back when CRT monitors were a thing and all this fancy plug’n’play technology wasn’t around you had modelines on your configuration files which told the system what kind of resolutions and refresh rates your actual hardware could support. And if you put wrong values there your analog and dumb monitor would just try to eat them as is with wildly different results. Most of the time it resulted just in a blank screen but other times the monitor would literally squeal when it attempted to push components well over their limits. And in extreme cases with older monitors it could actually physically break your hardware. And everything was expensive back then.
Fun times.
Oh, fun indeed 😄. Thanks!
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!
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.
If you weren’t at a university it was generally a challenge to get hold of disks. Downloading at home took forever on a 28.8 or even 56k modem (ie. 56 kilobits per second).
Slackware and Redhat disk sets were the thing, in my experience. But generally that only gave you the compiled code, not the source (although there was an another set of disks with the source packages).
If you wanted to recompile stuff you had to download the right set of packages, and be prepared to handle version conflicts on your own (with mailing list and usenet support).
Recompiling the kernel with specific patches for graphics cards, sound cards, modems and other devices (I remember scanners in particular), or specific combinations of hardware was relatively common. “Use the source, Luke!” was a common admonition. Often times specific FAQ pages or howtos would be made available for software packages, including games.
XFree86 was very powerful on hardware it supported, but was very finnicky. See the other posts about the level of detail that had to be supplied to get combinations of graphics cards and monitors working without the appearance of magic smoke.
Running Linux was mostly a enthusiast/hobbyist/geek thing, for those who wanted to see what was possible, and those who wanted to tinker with something approaching Unix, and those who wanted to stretch the limits of what their hardware could do.
Many of those enthusiasts and hobbyists and geeks discovered that Linux could do far more than anyone previously had been prepared to admit or realise. They, and others like them, took it with them into progressively more significant, and valuable projects, and it began to take over the world.
Slackware took like 40 3.5" double sided double density disks, and woe betide the poor soul who didn’t label them because the stack was a foot high and you damn well would get them mixed up.
When doing it from home I would frequently run into issues that required me to completely reinstall dos and Telemate to go back to usenet and get help, print the help and then take another stab.
Dos and Linux had different opinions about SCSI chain termination so this usually involved full cover off to move jumpers on the hard drives and sometimes irq jumpers on the motherboard to get the modem AND sound card working right.
Then the fact that to get online once you had slackware installed required you to write your own SLIP/PPP dialup scripts because every ISP was doing their own thing.
Honestly it was a fucking wonderful time. Many happy memories.
Ah, Linux from scratch…
Also, hardware was… Harder back then, on Linux (mostly modems).
Beside that, software wise there was less stuff on Linux than today, so you had to check carefully you had what you needed.
But I was already a Linux user, and a linux-only user at that.
Modems were easy. Stick the serial cable in. Done.
Is was those crappy winmodems that caused all the problems. They cheaped out on hardware, so you basically got a sound card. All of the work had to be done by the driver, which also put a lot of load on your CPU. Serial modems just worked since everything was done in hardware.
Ah, right I’d forgotten about those. Of course they weren’t actually modems. So there’s also that.
Way back in the early 90s I needed to use LaTeX for university. The dos version was awful and couldn’t handle large documents. So the options were (1) a nextcube for $$$$, (2) Nextstep 3.3 for PCs for $$$ (some faculty had this), or (3) linux. So I downloaded slackware on dozens of disks.
You had to configure the kernel, which wasn’t too hard since the autoconfig walked you through it. The hardest part was setting up X11, which required a lot of manual config, and if you screwed up the timings you could destroy a CRT monitor. OpenStep was an option, so there was a moderately friendly windowmanager available.
Learning Emacs was also fairly unpleasant, but that was the best option for editing TeX at the time.
Everything would work, until it suddenly would break. But nonetheless I was somehow able to get that thesis done.
Ugh, modern linux is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much better
Just to add to this, early on there was no such thing as kernel modules, so you had to compile your own kernel with the hardware support you needed for anything beyond basic (if I remember it correctly, it was only basic processor stuff, keyboard and text mode VGA) hardware support.
So I downloaded slackware on dozens of disks.
This is no joke. When I downloaded Slackware in '95 or '96, it was over 100 3.5" floppies of 1.44 MB each. And there were still more available, those were just the ones I thought I’d need. And before you could even begin installing, each of those had to be downloaded, written and verified because floppies were not terribly reliable.
It was prominent in smaller businesses that wanted or needed a Unix but weren’t going to pay what sun or IBM or HP and friends wanted for their hardware+software.
It ate the proprietary Unix market awfully quickly and I don’t think anyone really misses it.
For me, educational stuff was all windows with a small amount of macs and I don’t think I ever saw a Linux system in actual use anywhere.
I used it on the desktop but that was super rare because hardware support was nowhere as good as now - even getting X up was a challenge (go read up on mode lines if you want some entertainment).
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.
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.
I think you need to qualify that having used or tried Linux in college was normal in the 2000s for someone in computer science or engineering, or basically my fellow undiagnosed autistics and autistic adjacents. In my experience it was fairly normal in college for most people to have trouble operating a basic word processor, and they would not have had any idea what Linux was at all.
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.
windows-only ones. Modems
And, of course, they’d almost never actually SAY that on the box, so you had to see if you could look at what exact chip was on them and explain to a retail employee why you needed to look in the box, and that no, you certainly weren’t doing something sketchy, you just use Linux instead of wait why are you calling security…
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.
My linux experience:
1993 - Hey, there’s a new Unix-like thing for the PC. You can check it out down at the university computer club.
1994 - Wow, I finally managed to get X running
1996 - It was somewhat normal for more nerdy software developers to run linux full-time on their desktop at work.
1998 - Linux was taking over servers to the point where you rarely saw Solaris, HP-UX, AIX around any more.
2002 - Everyone agreed that linux was pretty much ready to take over the desktop as well.
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.
