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Comment by Scubabear68 | Hacker News Reader

This is a great read of a humble start of history. The A..B concurrency printing, helping Linus out implementing Sprintf, learning assembly. Building it all towards a coherent system.

What was truly profound is how Linux and other open source systems and libraries completely cracked open systems software for the masses. Back in the early 90s, everything around Unix, operating systems, compilers, tools, everything was crazy expensive to buy. And all of a sudden here came this thundering herd of code that was all completely free. Of course Gnu stuff had been around for awhile, but Linux is what propelled it into warp speed adoption. In thr 90s I was privileged to work at Bear Stearns and had a Sparc Station on my desk and regular interactions with SunOS, Solaris, and HPUX for the guys downstairs. Outside of University and business, it was hard for individuals to break into it.

By the late 90s any old anybody could get a CD ROM with Red Hat or whatever.

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I was born in 1989, so I missed the early days of Linux. However, I first heard of GNU and free software back in 2003 when I was looking for a free alternative to WinZip, a shareware utility for decompressing zip archives. That's when I discovered not only a free alternative (I believe it was 7zip), but also the GNU General Public License. Up until that point, I never heard of free, open-source software (this was before I heard of Mozilla as an alternative to Internet Explorer, which I found out about in early 2004, and later Firefox). I already knew how to program, but it was within the Microsoft ecosystem; I had a copy of Visual Basic and I longed for the day when I could save enough money for the entire Visual Studio suite. But once I read about free, open-source software, it was like a whole new world of software opened up to me. I was a bit of a "goody two-shoes" who didn't want to pirate software, but I couldn't afford licenses for many commercial software packages, so having access to Linux, OpenOffice, GIMP, GCC, and other applications was a very big deal to me.

One of the happiest moments of my teenage years came in 2004 when a teacher gave me his old 475MHz AMD K6-2 desktop with 64 MB RAM and Windows 98. Finally I had a computer of my own instead of using the family desktop! I downloaded and installed ZipSlack, a distribution of Slackware Linux that booted from DOS. Later that year a community college professor gave me FreeBSD installation disks. I credit these things for making me stick to a path of pursuing a career in computer science; at the time I was strongly considering majoring in linguistics, but I got entranced by operating systems and C thanks to Linux, FreeBSD, and gcc.

Nearly 20 years later it still amazes me how anyone with an Internet connection and a computer can not only download and install production-grade software that powers billion-dollar businesses absolutely for free, but also download and study the source code of these software tools for absolutely free as well. Sometimes I get pessimistic about the state of computing these days, but it's things like free, open source software that reminds me why I love computing so much and why I still pursue a career in this field.

Before Linux took off, I remember playing around with Coherent on either a 286 or 386SX box. It was enough of a Unix clone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)

It cost around $100, IIRC. It also came with an incredible manual, covering the OS, C programming, system calls, etc.

> By the late 90s any old anybody could get a CD ROM with Red Hat or whatever.

That's exactly how I got into Linux. I bought a book about RedHat 5.2 with a CD ROM install disc in the sleeve :) Have been using Linux on all of my personal devices (and every work device that I'm allowed to) ever since.

Oddly enough, I also had a Sparc Station 5 on my desk at one time. I remember the filesystem seemed very slow but it was cool as hell to be able to use "real Unix." I remember it even came with Internet Explorer of all things!

Exactly. I was in university '95-99 and had access to amazing Solaris, IRIX, AIX, and other machines, grew to love UNIX, and wanted to run it on Intel hardware at home. RH Linux did just the trick.

Started with Redhat 6.2! It was amazing and I did not turn back to Windows. My family was pissed at the fact that I dual booted the family PC!

RH 6.2 with Ximian Desktop and Crossover for Office support was peak Linux desktop. Then Microsoft released a new version of Office that purposely screwed with Crossover, and Nat and Miguel joined hands with the Great Satan, and desktop Linux spent a decade wandering in the wilderness.

i still remember reading when Carmack said (something like) anyone can learn to be any skill of developer, all they need is a used PC and linux CD.

this was an eye opening quote for me when i read it, for some reason. it meant that the craft of software was the most accessible in all of human crafting. really an amazing time to grow up.

Absolutely. I remember the articles in the trade press in the mid 90s asking "Is UN*X dead?" (Hindsight of course tells us that Betteridge's law applied)

But I was working for a small ISV making a windows based GIS and our customers were putting windows boxen on every desk in the office, and then ditching either intergraph based solutions or complex systems with Tektronix terminals. Our per seat license was a rounding error in their previous costs, and you could drag a selected rectangle from our map window and drop it into a word document. I occasionally helped with sales demos and you could see when the decision was made in the faces of the senior people when they saw this.

> The A..B concurrency printing

Are those some sort of standard teaching exercise? Because before this article I only saw them in the description of the “concurrency geek” archetype on OSDev Wiki: https://wiki.osdev.org/Eleanore_Semaphore.

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