Linus Torvalds announces Linux (1991) | Hacker News Reader

Linus Torvalds announces Linux (1991)

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248 pointsyurisagalov140 comments

Although I’ve read this probably a dozen times. What I think about this today, as I’m about to reviel my next project is that it’s so crazy how things evolved for open source. Nowadays people compete with companies and having an announcment like this usually includes :

- website explaining as a pitch what is better about your software

- ready to use examples and templates to support your claim

- branding with a logo that makes you look more professional

- issue tracker

- github repository ( even mirror of yours )

- bugfree software ready for production from day one.

And many more which I probably miss.

Writing something “cool” nowadays is not enough to be taken from the folks seriously.

And yet with all that ... I likely still won't understand what exactly the product or thing is or does.

Meanwhile I understand Linus's email well enough.

I can't count the number of times I've read an announcement of some OSS project, gone to the project home page, read it all and still had absolutely no idea what it was, what it did or why it might be important.

It is impressive how much Linus had working at that point though. Getting bash and gcc working and a multithreaded FS is no mean feat, and is enough for other people to actually make useful contributions without excessive pain.

I usually have to go to Wikipedia to learn what a project is about, since their format puts the info in the first couple paragraphs.

If a project is not (yet) there, it's either Github, because markdown readmes somehow force the crux of the matter out of people… or it's goodbye.

It is impressive how much Linus had working at that point though.

Particularly when you consider that he had to do it all on bare metal.

It probably means you're not the target audience.

Most often it is that the author is so involved they forget to given enough context. They are so passionate about a topic, but don’t realize that others do not drink the same Kool-Aid every day.

More than half of the emails I get from technology companies fail to start with a reminder of what their product or service does. I see this much, much less frequently with consumer products — better marketing.

While this may be true, it can still be helpful to have an FAQ, context, or other way that interested parties can understand applicability.

I fully appreciate shorthand/jargon are ways to communicate complex ideas swiftly. Yet, taking time to provide some form of entry point for the uninitiated shows a disciplined approach that often translates to other areas of the project.

That's probably due to OS is much more well known than some random open source software.

Probably more because Linus is pretty much bs-free (for the better and worse).

I think that is a little simplistic, the main thing that got Linux going was sustained and continued effort. If this first message had been a flop Linus would likely have continued working and pushing it through. It was almost a decade before Linux could be considered a "real" operating system ready for production.

Less than a decade by far.

It was already in wide spread use amongst the small dial-up ISPs by 1995.

The bulk of the .com era was still on SUN and commercial Unicies. Linux was still in its early adopter phase. It was only in the 2000s that it started to get widespread adoption.

I can hear RMS right now... "It's GNU/Linux."

Reimplementing the humongous GNU toolchain would be totally worth it just to stop reading that line over and over again.

Eh, I can't agree. Lots of projects that grow up to be successful start as just a GH repo with a decent Readme.

It's very common now for a brand new project that's not even at a raw alpha quality to have a fancy logo. It feels like priorities can get out of whack sometimes.

Some would argue that you should be trying to market what isn’t ready yet, to see if people are actually interested. What’s wrong with having a logo to let people know you’re serious about the project and that if it gains traction it has less of a chance of being yet another abandoned github repo?

Yeah, that is fair. I think it depends on how you look at it. For me when I see a very early project with a shiny logo it feels to me like the author is more interested in getting popular than building something. But maybe I'm just jaded.

> Writing something “cool” nowadays is not enough to be taken from the folks seriously.

Linux' success was not due to this message. I mean, the message advertised a toy OS in a group devoted to toy OSs, which naturally helped attract contributors, but it wasn't sue to that post why nowadays half the world runs on linux. Linux was also not the only FLOSS OS kernel out at that time, nor was it even working. In fact, arguably what made linux the success was the fact that, years later, they managed to get a working UNIX clone to run the full GNU stack, thus providing just enough features to offer a tool with practical use for a very specific use (servers).

Even then the main driving force wasn't the kernel itself but the distributions that managed to provide convenient software bundles that users could simply pickup and test and use. For those projects, providing those websites and templates and howtos and videos and tutorials was essential to get their foot on the door,because otherwise the barrier to entry would remain high and higher than any of their competitors'.

I dunno, whenever I hear about a new piece of OSS it seems to already have a bunch of users saying they used it here there and everywhere

> Writing something “cool” nowadays is not enough to be taken from the folks seriously.

You don't have to be taken seriously by serious folks. You just need some folks to like it - or be intrigued.

The other thing is that the gap in the market can be more important than the product itself. So, the first version can be absolutely terrible...

e.g. People want free unix.

people give Jobs and Gates a lot of credit because they focused on commercial products that were marketed to the public -- Linus, for me, is probably the single most important person to technology (software) in the last 35 years. With Linux and Git alone, it as impactful and game changing in this industry that I can think of. I cannot think of any person that's been this important to my career and my income.

Somewhere in a cavern full of sandals, a Stallmanu is quietly weeping.

I really dislike this snarky comment, but rather than down vote it, I thought I'd give an alternate view.

I was around at the time that Linux was born. I remember the HURD. I had done some work on Mach while I was in university and I was hugely interested in working on the HURD. I sent email to MIB and essentially received a reply "We don't need you kid". But this is the way it was at the time. People working on GNU were used to doing things in a Cathedral fashion (to put it in ESR's terms). They had small teams where only a few trusted people had input. The rest were users, not collaborators.

The internet was not common at that point and we didn't have things like distributed source repositories. Development was usually done using CVS and you had to be a core contributor to have access. You got access to source code from releases only. And while some projects had fairly regular releases, some did not. For the HURD, I think the idea was that there was no point to having regular releases because it wasn't even self hosting yet.

Linus showed up and changed the world. He said, "Here's this thing I've been working on" and he didn't care who you were. If you sent him a patch, he looked at it. This was completely different from how things used to work for most projects. Linus didn't make you sign over your copyright. He didn't vet you as a core or non-core developer. He just took your patch and evaluated it on its technical merits.

The whole Bazaar approach that is common today, stems from how Linus ran kernel development right from the start. It changed everything in free software development because it was just 100x better. No friction. Welcoming. Not discriminatory.

But if you think RMS is sad about this state of affairs, I think you are terribly mistaken. The HURD was a failure because the world changed under them. Linus came around and showed everybody how software freedom is supposed to work in practice. This took a powerful but small group and expanded its reach to the everyday programmer. RMS's dream of a world where normal developers valued free software over proprietary software came about because of this shift -- and he's smart enough to realise it.

RMS was clumsy about the whole GNU/Linux thing, but Linux only existed because GNU existed. Back in the day, the first thing I would do when I got a new Unix box was to install GNU -- because it was massively better than whatever crap came with the Unix system. Even now, despite the advances of BSD systems, I would still install GNU on top of a BSD kernel if I was running BSD.

Occasionally I hear people asking the question, "If Android is running Linux, why can't I run my Linux apps on my phone?" It drives me crazy. It's because you've got an Android/Linux box instead of a GNU/Linux box. The bit you want is GNU, not Linux. This is precisely why people like RMS wanted to stress the importance of GNU in the equation. I don't agree with his approach, but it's foolish to deny the basis of the argument.

Without RMS's vision, we would not be where we are today. I lived in the world where I had to use $5k per seat proprietary libraries to get anything done. I lived in the world where large corporations who built compilers told me what I was allowed to build. RMS rescued us from that. ESR gave us a vocabulary with which to talk about this stuff. He categorised the kinds of ways people approached things and allowed us to think critically about what we were doing. Linus showed us how to actually make it work. All of these people have disagreed with specific things the others have said, but they also show massive respect for one another -- for good reason. Without them, our lives as developers would be infinitely worse.

That was quite a story. Younger people like me just don't know/appreciate how history actually developed and why things are the way they are.

The best comment I've read on hacker news this week. Thank you.

Holy shit. Goosebumps. Thank you for writing this. I vaguely knew about all of these characters (RMS, ESR, Linus) but this ties it together nicely.

Thanks for sharing this. Awesome story and really gives context to the whole thing.

It's still GNU/Linux to me dammit!

and to me..

'Its Still Real To Me Damn It!'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvd3aEsThbc

Would there have been a GPL without Stallman?

I’m not detracting from Linus at all but it’s just a kernel - I think one of the BSD’s would have filled the void

Hmm, one of BSDs.

In 1991 there were already five or so. Plus other 'cheap' Unixes like Xenix and the usual big names.

If Linux didn't happen we'd have a few thousand BSD variants by now.

The great thing about Linus was the combination of technical brilliance and his forceful personality.

They were still in copyright battle with AT&T until 1994 and by that time it was too late, Linux was on its way.

This. Linux wasn't based on proprietary code, and wasn't saddled by any sort of license.

The original BSD that Bell Labs gave to Berkeley in 1974 was anything but open source. It was an operating system that Bell had provided to the university with source code available for modification and redistribution ONLY to other universities WHO ALSO HELD research licenses from Bell Labs.

And it still wasn't open-source in the early 90's when Berkeley scrubbed all the proprietary bits out of it and tried to sell it for profit. That's when AT&T sued them.

So even if you HAD a copy of the BSD source code pre-1994 it wouldn't have been the same as someone handing you code and asking for your advice on it. You would have certainly found yourself in court if you modified early BSD for redistribution.

A bit of revisionism going on there.

Bell Labs was allowed to finally start charging for UNIX after the split was done, so they went after the most attractive fish that were getting paid to sell UNIX, as AT&T wanted to bring it all back in house.

I guess that means the small dial-up ISPs started appearing before 1994 and ended up choosing Linux.

I remember that back then FreeBSD was seen as the serious OS and Linux was just an unstable toy. Reputable hosts used FreeBSD.

I agree with this. It is likely that something else would've filled the void. Maybe something much better. Maybe we're missing on a lot because Linux popped up :)

We would all be using Aix, HP-UX, Tru64, Solaris, DG/UX, .... and Windows.

Nah, you’d be running Windows NT 9.3 platinum edition and liking it.

I am already running Windows 10 and liking it.

<sidebar> I just finished reading the book "Here Comes Everybody" by Clay Shirky (circa 2008). In the book he mentions this very "announcement."

What's fascinating, per the book, is Linux was one of the first significant byproducts (if you will) of (internet) connectivity and how that enabled easy group / team formation.

In the case of Linux, its growth helped to further connectivity, etc. That is, in creating Linux, it helped spread Linux.

Great problem to have ;)

</sidebar>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody

I don't know that I would call Linux "one of the first". Usenet had been around for a long time, and there were plenty of projects that were enabled via Usenet and mailing lists. For example, perl predates Linux by four years.

Pardon me for mis-paraphrasing a 300 page book. The key I left out was that Linux went on to compete with the likes of Microsoft, and is used on a significant number of internet servers.

I'm pretty sure it was one of the first to start so small and acheive so much.

It's also why NetHack (from 1987) was called "Net"Hack.

And “Net”BSD. Collaborating over the Internet was novel at the time.

I distinctly remember when I became aware of NNTP, the new protocol that allowed Usenet to be distributed almost in real-time, using TCP/IP instead of UUCP. Electronic mail, file transfers, and remote terminals already existed using various other protocols, but seeing Usenet over the Internet made me realize that something new and exciting was about to happen (and a few years later that turned out to be Tim Berners-Lee).

Such a humble announcement. I miss these kinds of projects. Most new projects today (by individuals or otherwise) are usually "best of", "world changing", "ground shaking", emoji filled nonsense, usually biting more than the developer(s) can handle, causing a buggy mess.

I don't agree; most new projects I see are like this[1] - just the code, a reasonable description and some documentation.

The flashy projects are probably more likely to appear on HN/Reddit, but I don't think they're at all more common.

[1] https://github.com/vervallsweg/cast-web-api

To be clear, Linux was definitely a buggy mess at the beginning and definitely more than Linus could handle, but they got through that by building community around fixing all of that.

That's fine, bugs are acceptable and expected as long as expectations are set accordingly. It seems clear from the start that the project didn't promise the world and its sister.

More than he could handle? “I’ve already ported bash and gcc and it seems to work”. Who, even today, would even dare trying to do so much work in a few months?

I remember when I first installed Linux and was trying to find my way around (1994ish) and I couldn't help but feel hopelessly behind, like everybody had way more experience than I did, and knew way more than I did.

Funny thing was, of course, that WAS true at the time, but it wasn't a reason not to do it. Let that be a lesson to anyone who hasn't learned the lesson themselves yet!

I first tried it in late '96.

Followed the instructions, got it installed on a spare machine at work, rebooted and it was working! Logged in and tried some command (I think it was "dir")

I got back "bash: dir: command not found" (although I recall it as "syntax error" so my memory is fuzzy)

I was taken aback. Did I really make such a huge mistake that the operating system wanted to bash me?

This is a great example of the Inspection Paradox, mentioned on HN earlier this week:

https://allendowney.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-inspection-para...

This is great! Thank you!

Wow, fascinating. I love the detail about probably never supporting anything other than AT hard disks and 386; isn't it funny now that Linux supports more hardware than just about damn near any operating system, free or otherwise?

...and it doesn't support 386 anymore!

> I'm doing a (free) operating system (__just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu__) for 386(486) AT clones. [...] and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.

__just a hobby, won't be big and professional like X__ probably is how most of the startups get started.

Based on the pitches I’ve seen, it’s very much the opposite. ”We are about to completely upend the X industry, with a market potential of hundreds of billions”

"We are disrupting the AI blockchain cannabis industry using state of the art AR/VR technology"

Only "state of the art"? Dropped.

You're onto something!

Obligatory link to one of the many corporate bullshit generators around, though this one creates entire documents and not just sentences. Just in case someone needs one :)

https://lurkertech.com/corpspeak/

Does anyone know the video of an entrepreneur at a conf who nailed the startup pitch language and levers? I’ve been looking for it for quite some time, I don’t know the name, it was a 5-minute pitch between sessions.

When I hear this, My instinct is to roll my eyes. So much hyperbole in startups, it’s one of the large reasons I don’t see myself working for a startup.

Exactly. It makes me cringe. A majority of the firms looking to hire in the "Who's Hiring" thread have inflated self-worth.

As a developer the company can have whatever view of itself it cares to have as long as my paycheck clears.

They expect their devs to be equally enthusiastic, the true believers are also gullible enough to work unpaid overtime.

Most engineers care about equity potential. You don't make it in the Valley on base salary alone.

This is why I don't work in the Valley and am only listed in entries in the Who's Hiring list that are full time remote or outside of the Valley.

I'm sure you can set whatever standard or lack thereof you'd like.

I think OP meant most successful companies

And I meant all successful startups, lol

Not anymore. :-(

Sell before you build a product!

Don't build what you want, build what other's want!

Build what other's are going to pay money for, hell, sell it, get a contract before you write a line of code!

If you don't have a market size of multiple billions is not worth doing!

Are you going to make billions upon billions? No? don't do it!

Hobby? It's not even worth of a side project.

I'm currently doing the opposite of every 'rule' and loving it.

Building what I want, because I want it to exist. Showing it to nobody else to test or get feedback on; no focus groups, no beta testing, no external input. Solo founder effort. Not taking VC; not under any circumstances or terms. Not selling or promoting anything before it launches. It's commercially minimalist by design and ethos, ideally it takes in the least amount of money necessary to fund its own expansion. There's no exit, hopefully it lasts perpetually; I aim to at least guarantee and pursue its operation for the next decade (it'll take that long to really build it out). It's thin on both the front and back ends, inexpensive to run and scale. Something like it doesn't currently exist and it will benefit humanity very modestly if I get it up to scale.

It's the first time in the last 20 years I've built something very large in scope that wasn't about making money in any manner. Something that is more important than my own ambitions in life. Going to launch it with a Show HN in the next two months or so. Hopefully it works out, either way it was a lot of fun to build (it will have likely taken seven or eight months of work from conception to kicking it out the door).

This was probably your intention, but I really want to know what it is.

Those are mostly advice for building a business, not necessarily an open source project.

It’s all about the context. That’s a list of things that VCs want to see - their business mode is all about funding companies that have a decent shot to make a TONNE of money, reasonably quickly, so they can have a huge exit in the funds timeframe. If you want VC money, it’s reasonable advice to follow. But if you just wanna build an open source passion project, or even a bootstrapped business, it doesn’t apply.

I actually don’t see a conflict between that advice, which is aimed at people trying to start VC funded businesses, and what Linus did, which was an open source passion project that grew into something more.

Probably the best ones. The people who are convinced from the start that their product is revolutionary tend to be less flexible than those who are just fiddling around, and may as a result fail to develop it as effectively.

Was that a dog at GNU’s vapor ware OS?

Weirdly, every time I see this e-mail I curse AT&T and think how much time and opportunity they cost the BSDs.

Just yesterday I was watching his interview from a couple of years ago (in Finnish, sadly he doesn't do many of those any more).

He credited having a fair amount of free time during his 8 years of studying at University of Helsinki being a fairly big enabler of how Linux happened (or how he had time to work on it). I found that interesting

I'm from the Helsinki University of Technology and it was not uncommon that people got their masters degree in about 10 years of studying and working simultaneously.

Is there something special about today that this is being posted again?

"PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code"

That's kind of interesting now. Most Linux installations today coexist with a management processor running Minix. So what was a sort of mild rivalry is now a détente.

Minix had a proprietary license that forbade distributing altered copies (but not patches, but managing patches "out of tree" was unwieldy). Minix 3 is (I believe) gpl.

So free of any Minix code, means, it's free software, primarily. Not really a slight against Minix, per se.

There was still a bit of a rivalry there. Like this for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum–Torvalds_debate

Minix 3 is BSD licensed.

Indeed. And so is minix 1, apparently - since 2000:

https://minix1.woodhull.com/faq/mxlicense.html

I'd say most Linux installations today are Android mobiles. Do those have Minix too?

No, but Android does use a different microkernel (LK) as it's bootloader.

It's also likely that Google will replace Linux on Android with Fuschia, yet another microkernel OS, derived from LK.

The Linux kernel is irrelevant for Android userspace as it isn't actually exposed in public APIs.

You might access Linux syscalls and certain paths, but the only guarantee is that it will work on your own device.

Debate Question: would Linux have done so well without the wintel monopoly/monoculture on which it spread?

Depends on what we had instead. The fact that Wintel systems had unlocked bootloaders was absolutely critical. But it could equally have been started on any system with an MMU. Certainly it's been ported to a lot of systems.

Was it important to have a monoculture is what I'm wondering.

> Was it important to have a monoculture is what I'm wondering

Obviously this is just speculation but I would say, no. And the reason I say that is that Linux primarily took off on the server side. Mobile was quite a lot later.

On the server side it wasn't a monoculture. Sun was a huge player. When we were making the case for Linux, around 2000, it was presented as a cost play against Sun/Solaris.

Of course, it's fair to say that part of the reason it was a cost play was because Intel kit was so cheap and that was a direct effect of the desktop environment. But I'd contend that it wasn't a reaction to the Wintel desktop monopoly.

Thats a really interesting view on it, thanks

The fact that linux runs on almost anything would probably have helped it in a heterogeneous environment.

But is 'linux runs on anything' something that happened after it had achieved critical mass?

See sibling comment.

How long has that been true? It certainly started out as PC-only.

It was ported pretty early, I remember "beowulf clusters" of devices mentioned on Slashdot in the late 90s.

Edit: Checked wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Chronology

1995: Linux is ported to the DEC Alpha and to the Sun SPARC. Over the following years it is ported to an ever-greater number of platforms.

You mean “IBM PC clone”. “Wintel” wasn't really a thing until Microsoft’s dominant consumer and business OSs were Windows, starting with Windows 95, by which point Linux had already done a lot of spreading.

It's because MS-DOS and to a lesser extent Windows 3 was so bad at isolating you from the hardware that all the hardware had to be identical. If MS-DOS had been more like, say, CP/M then we would have had loads of weird machines from different manufacturers isolated from the software by proprietary BIOS[1] blobs. This would have made it harder to provide a useful Linux that worked across multiple machines.

[1] I mean "BIOS" in the CP/M sense of a layer that completely abstracted the hardware to the BDOS.

Q-DOS from which MS-DOS is derived is basically a clone of CP/M. I've written a CP/M bios for fun to bootstrap my IMSAI. It's not really that high level. You got even more from IBM's BIOS but of course that was too slow for what people wanted to do with those machines - so everyone talked to the hardware directly.

In those days it didn't matter what you were doing - the hardware was too slow. It's not like today where you can trade off performance for reliability or cleanliness. People praise Wozniak for his genius of trading hardware for software, but the tight coupling made it really hard to make future iterations. People didn't value upwards compatibility yet.

Windows 3.0 and especially 3.1 were where it took over from DOS in the business world.

Windows 3.x required DOS 3+, it didn't replace DOS. NT and, on the consumer side 95, replaced DOS as the base OS.

That's not really an important distinction. 3.x was the first mainstream Windows.

Win95 still booted from a modified DOS.

True, but that DOS and Win95 weren't separate products.

> It is NOT protable

Made me laugh, as I don't know any other OS that runs on such a variety of hardware nowadays ;-)

NetBSD!

Show HN: I Installed Linux on my Hat

> Summary: small poll for my new operating system

I'm intrigued. Does the email standard actually include a 'summary' field? If so, why doesn't that still exist?

As zerohp said, Usenet. Here's an RFC link I just chased down:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5536#section-3.2.11

Not email, USENET.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1036

2.2.10. Summary

    This line should contain a brief summary of the message.  It is
    usually used as part of a follow-up to another message.  Again, it
    is very useful to the reader in determining whether to read the
    message.

This is a usenet post, not an email. RFC 1036 includes 'Summary' as an optional field.

One question: Being noob at OS stuff, I feel quite impressed that bash and GCC could work on the Linux that Linus built on his own. But everybody says that Linux really was something interesting as soon as a proper memory management was added to it. And that was done, but not by Linus. So, which achievement sounds to you the most impressive? Building the first Linux? Or adding that (afaiu, critical) memory management feature?

What do you think that "proper memory management" was?

Linus himself implemented virtual memory support with paging to disc in Linux version 0.12 (Jan 1992). This made people to switch from Minix to Linux.

Maybe you mix it up with some other important feature? X was ported to Linux by Orest Zborowski in 92. Or networking? That was not a one-man show.

I don't think there is a total ordering on impressive achievements. Both are impressive in their own ways.

So, in large, it depends on what perspective you have in looking at it.

That story sounds odd to me, as I've never heard it. Looking for history I found https://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/962/CS-TR-392... which describes the history of memory management as "unclear".

I would say it really took off with userland package management - Debian in 1993 https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.os.linu... following SLS in 1992.

To me it feels that kernel debugging is the hard part; if you're lucky you get a nice clean panic with stacktrace, but if not the machine just locks up. Or overwrites critical parts of its filesystem. Or, in some extreme cases, is bricked and will never boot again.

The photo shows a beer bottle and he refers to the development as "brewing". Being a home brewing enthusiast - that sure caught my attention.

"Fun fact": I just noticed that he is using an old email address, after that I believe it was changed to @cs.helsinki.fi and after @helsinki.fi

" At the moment, the City of Helsinki uses the address Hel.fi, while the address Helsinki.fi belongs to the University of Helsinki."[1]

[1] https://www.hel.fi/helsinki/en/administration/information/in...

Curious - what about Linux in particular made people interested in it so much as opposed to contributing to some *BSD, or Hurd? Strictly the license?

In 1991, the BSD's as we know them today didn't exist.

  386BSD - 1992
  FreeBSD - 1993
  NetBSD - 1993
  OpenBSD - 1996

There were also ongoing lawsuits concerning AT&T code:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD#History

I'm not 100% sure but from memory I don't believe the HURD (Mach-based) kernel was even bootable in 1991. I didn't see bootable HURD releases till much later in the 1990's and they were notoriously unstable.

Didn’t people on usenet pay his computer off?

In 1991 I printed MINIX code and was studying it

this is rather inspiring. humble beginnings, mountains moved.

I can only imagine the first comment was someone telling him it would never work.

Nope: https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/comp.os.minix/dlNt...

Though Usenet could get toxic at times.

I like how the first comment muses about porting it to Amiga, and Linus reiterates that no, sorry, it's completely impossible to port. Just way too hardware-dependent, don't even bother trying.

Saying something is unfeasible or hard to do doesn't make your comment toxic.

Actually much of usenet was still civil and quite usable in the early 90s.

before the Eternal September

This was before AOL.

Shameless plug of my related submission of yesterday : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18345058

If someone can explain it, I'm open to new hypothesis.

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