I really wish that I was born early so I’ve could witness the early years of Linux. What was it like being there when a kernel was released that would power multiple OSes and, best of all, for free?
I want know about everything: software, hardware, games, early community, etc.
The first time I encountered Linux was around 2007. I was just a kid in the 1990’s. None of my family had a computer science or programming affiliation. My dad worked for a company that made industrial plants and was an electrician. I got several old x286 through x386 desktops mostly in pieces for free as a result. I pieced these together to build our family’s first computers. I built stuff from the Windows 3.1 through XT era like this. I really only cared about AOL instant messanger, hotmail, MySpace, Age of Empires, Worms, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Star Craft, and Command and Conquer. So I had no real reason to search for alternatives. I think most of the Linux world revolves around networking and academics. Most people did not get into Linux unless they crossed these spaces. That kinda changed when M$ started deprecating hardware around the time of Windows 8, and adding native stalkerware ads nonsense. These give motivations that did not exist in the past. Also, it is very hard to understand how small computing and the internet were before the early 2000’s. You could not transfer media. This is why Linux distros on a CD were a thing. Most people had dialup connections. Let’s say you Jake an 8k image of 81922. That is 67m bits. If you were somehow capable of using the maximum theoretical bit rate of a 56k dialup modem, it would take 1200 seconds to load that image (20 minutes). In practice, triple that number, and pray for stability during the entire connection which was quite rare in a residential area. Back then, if you were downloading anything and the connection dropped, your file failed and you had to start over. So the primary way most people acquired software of any kind was in a brick and mortar retail store. Like Napster was super novel at the time as the first time a bit torrent client could be download and just worked without configuration complexity. It was a very different time. Like newspapers were a big part of life. The local classified ads were the primary way to find a job, a first car, and what was going on in your region. Any kind of real knowledge depth required making a trip to the local library.