this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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I know a guy who loved unix in the 80s. He saved everything he had to buy a SunOS machine at home, since he already had one as a workstation at his dayjob. As soon as Linux was semi-"usable" (we're talking about the early 90s), he migrated to it.
I know how lucky I am to be a 2000s Linux users. But sometimes, I'm kinda envious of this early generation. For example, with this guy I know, his knowledge of legacy unix APIs is insane…
Early Linux was painful. Hardware compatibility was sketchy. X11 graphics were especially suspect. These are days of CRT monitors, and it was a regular practice you'd have to craft your X Window config files by hand even inputting the refresh rates and specific resolutions your display would support.
Packages and package managers didn't exist yet. I'd downloaded the (at the time) recent version of Slackware but had trouble getting the compiler working and nearly EVERYTHING required compiling from source. Easy accessible public version controlled source code repos weren't a thing yet either. You had to go to an FTP site (or BBS) and hope the maintainer labeled the directory structure properly for the code and version you wanted.
I picked up my first commercially purchased copy of Linux (SUSE release 5) because it had 4 CDs of programs/utilities, had YaST, and I found a newsgroup posting detailing part of what I was trying to accomplish at the time, a dual analog modem bonded proxy (Squid!) to provide 128kps dial up internet for my employer (with a 6.8kps download time to users).
Lots of us weren't running full IP networks at the time. At another employer I ran IPX (file and print for Netware services), Netbeui for Windows peer-to-peer connections, and finally TCP/IP for internet operations (full public IPs on each workstation with no firewall!!!)
For the dozen things you've seen him pull out of his hat that look like magic to you there are a thousand things he knows about long dead technologies and techniques that were simply a requirement of getting through the day back then.
16 years old me had sweaty palms writing those XFree86 config files at first in the early 2000s. I remember all the warnings saying if you screw up this file say goodbye to your monitor, Luckily never happened.
I started with CDs on magazines, my first ones were mandrake 7.2 and suse (can't remember the version), and later moved to my university's Linux Users Groups' Install Fests for CD burning.
I remember a little later still having dial up on my student apartment, I would download the repo data and then make a download script and use uni broadband to download updates, that was in Mandrake 9.
Later on, you could sign up with Ubuntu to get the CDs shipped for free. The package came with 5 CDs and a bunch of stickers, in a paper/bubble wrapp envelope.
Ugh, I had forgotten the joy of editing XFree86 config files and then having to figure out how to correct that spelling error I made without a screen or network access.
I'm happy I can use WiFi on a laptop without having to grab a device driver from Windows and use it with NDISwrapper or, before that, having to find a laptop with a real serial port so I could use an external modem because Winmodems (fake modems that were just crappy sound cards hooked up to the phone line that did all the modem stuff in the device driver) only ever worked on Windows.
I actually bought an USB dial up modem from a friend so I could avoid dealing with winmodems and manually typing PPPoE in the terminal to go online. Also, Debian on 4 DVDs was a godsend.