Brian Masinick
Here’s another story that contains stories from various people in various places who ended up trying Linux :
http://opensource.com/article/21/5/switch-to-linux?utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=weekly&sc_cid=7013a000002wCXKAA2
My own Linux story is that I had read many computer magazine Develop articles about Linux, but it wasn’t until I joined the Digital UNIX Development Environment team working specifically on Localization (L10N) and Internationalization (I18N) that I heard a few people in the hallway talking about Linux.
One day, I was near a popcorn, break, and coffee station nook and ran across an old friend, a guy named Jon “maddog” Hall. Years earlier, Jon and I ate popcorn in the afternoon in Merrimack, NH, where Digital Equipment Corporation had a Government Systems Group, several marketing organizations, including a telecommunications team of marketing and systems engineering, and several small operating systems groups. Most were for some of their older 16-bit minicomputer systems that were in the maturing, late years of existence, but a few were about to emerge, including the group that Jon was in – ULTRIX 16, 32m, and 32. These would all be merged into Digital UNIX, which is where we met the SECOND time – eating popcorn – and later, for dinner and a few “cold beverages”.
Jon believed that Digital needed to spend more energy on the more established versions of UNIX (which our Telco groups were also interested in, because our customers wanted to use the AT&T versions of UNIX – either on our hardware, or elsewhere from someone who would produce it. Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, and IBM all joined in the hunt to attract UNIX customers. We got into it too with Digital UNIX, but then Jon spotted another interesting alternative – the young man from Helsinki, Finland, who came up with Linux. Some of us in the OS groups were interested too. I was interested enough to finally purchase my own computer. Prior to that, I’d sign out a terminal and a modem or a Digital Rainbow PC to connect to our company servers, but this Linux really interested me.
I got a Micron P100 – a 32-bit, 100 Mhz PC. It came in the store preinstalled with Windows for Workgroups 3.11, a release with modem network software included.
I DUAL booted my first system with Windows and Slackware. The Slackware of that era presented some challenges; the one I tried I got from a book, and the graphics card support was old, and therefore I got a 640×480 resolution with only 8 colors. I had to research how to improve this.
I found the fix, downloaded the fix onto my UNIX workstation, then wrote it to those 3 1/2″ removable disks that were available in the mid nineties, and improved the graphics capability to 1024×768 and 256 colors; modest today, but a huge improvement.
Slackware took two removable disks to install it back then, so it was an exercise. It wasn’t terrible for an engineer to handle, but it took a lot more time to accomplish than the simple installations we enjoy today. What I really DID enjoy with Slackware and the simpler Web environment of the day (mostly text, with only small, occasional graphics) was a clean, responsive environment in some ways similar (but much less modern) than the antiX we enjoy today. It did have a very pleasant, quick response that I enjoyed. It seemed as fast as my UNIX workstation, though the workstation was 64-bit with more than double the processor speed, much larger disk capacity and memory capacity. This means that the simple Slackware was much more efficient than the UNIX with a full Common Desktop Environment (CDE).
Of course, if you ran CDE on today’s hardware it would be super fast! 🙂
Anyway, Jon and I shared many memories. This past year I saw a couple of feature articles that Jon wrote in Linux Magazine, called Maddog’s Doghouse. Interestingly he wrote about some of those early days – the same ones he and I discussed over popcorn or a “cold”, after work beverage. The October 2020 issue tells a few of those tales.
I really accelerated my Linux testing in 2001, put two disk drives on one of my systems and starting multi-booting Linux and vxWorks instances. I had 12-13 instances a couple of times, rarely less that 6-10 for quite a few years. It was 2001 that I started using Debian. I found Libranet that same year, MEPIS a couple of years my later, and caught antiX in testing before it was released, along with some of the early PCLinuxOS releases, Red Hat, SUSE, Mandrake, later Mandriva, KNOPPIX, and many others.
Now I’m retired so I don’t do anything other than multiboot and browse the Web.
My technical skills are getting out of date.
When it comes to history though, I have several decades of stories to tell.
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Brian Masinick
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