Silicon Valley Tea Party a.k.a. the great 1998 Linux revolt take II (1999)
marc.merlins.org
marc.merlins.org
I wonder if the same thing still goes on. It probably was quite an effective filter for the nerdiest and most obsessive people back in 1999, and it probably still is, but somehow that kind of mindset seems a bit outdated today. If it does still exist I'd be interested to know what kind of status macOS has! Literally nobody on the CS course had a Mac, despite the very cool and colourful iMacs being very popular.
And of course an IBM Thinkpad T42.
It's hard to understand today because Windows isn't by far the overlord it was in the late 90s and early 2000s. Alternatives like Amiga, Atari, SGI, Sun and even the Mac were dead or on their deathbed, and it looked like there would only be one operating system in the future, and one that wasn't exactly a triumph of engineering.
Thankfully that future didn't happen and Windows is essentially only relevant for running PC games today.
What an odd statement. You’re ignoring the vast majority of all office computers all over the world here, the on-prem infrastructure of most companies, and cheap home computers. Not everyone can afford to buy a Mac; Office tools and huge swaths of domain-specific tools only run on Windows; and despite what Linux enthusiasts want you to believe, Linux doesn’t support existing Windows software well enough for common business use.
You may be referring to the needs of rich software engineers in western countries exclusively here, but overwhelming majority of the world’s client computers are firmly in Microsoft’s hands.
That's a very different situation from 20 years ago, where a lot of important software only existed for Windows.
E.g. today you can just ditch Windows and install Linux on that same old laptop and wouldn't lose anything important.
I agree with you that many people probably could use a Linux computer if there was any incentive to go that direction. That isn’t reality though, and likely won’t be any time soon.
You have an extremely skewed view of what "relevant software" is, if you believe this. The second you try and use a computer for anything professional, besides nerd stuff and a few key "creative" areas that Apple has cultural cachet in like music production and graphic design, you are absolutely going to find yourself reliant on some completely entrenched "industry standard" piece of software that's been around for many decades and only runs on Microsoft Windows. Autodesk still sells 3ds Max for a couple grand, and it's Windows-only. Hell, even TurboTax only runs on Windows. And if you manage to dodge that, there's bound to be some critical piece of hardware that can only be controlled from a Windows computer.
The biggest propaganda win that Microsoft pulled was getting nerds - the biggest loudmouths about software freedom - off their case. 90s style free software fanaticism is basically dead. Meanwhile the rest of the world is absolutely still locked in to Windows. Know how you can tell? Because Windows is now widely regarded as a pile of shit, riddled with adware even out of the box ("Candy Crush in the Start menu") and yet people still use it, because they have to.
>E.g. today you can just ditch Windows and install Linux on that same old laptop and wouldn't lose anything important.
I challenge you to try this with a nontechnical friend who uses a computer for work. They will be screaming at you to put it back like it was within the week. I say this as a die-hard Linux user.
it still amazes me how the newer generation of technical people see Microsoft as non-evil or, in some cases, even the good guy. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was re-convincing the world he doesn't exist.
edit: wasn't the google motto "don't be evil" basically meant to mean don't be Microsoft?
In fact, it increasingly feels like desktop itself is relegated to this kind of use, with smartphone becoming the primary computing device for most things.
And this is where Linux won over MS - it wasn't on the desktop (which is still a mostly terrible experience to this day), but in the server room.
Coupled with Java or Perl and OSS Databases (MySQL and Postgres), people began moving software off the desktop and onto websites. Better web browsers (something else MS tried to dominate and were rebuffed) also helped. This cut MS out of the loop on new popular web servers (apache), protocols, languages and infrastructure - probably deliberately. This then allowed alternative platforms like the new iPhone and later android to gain a niche which they've since expanded massively.
I think people saw the monoculture that was developing around Windows (from days of XP onwards), and didn't like it, so actively sought to make their own path, Linux became was keystone there (could have been BSD though also...).
Microsoft didn't lift a finger. In the early years while they still had developer fanaticism behind it, the FOSS movement delivered Linux, which was an adequate substitute for Windows, but failed to deliver an adequate software ecosystem to compete with the Windows software ecosystem to jumpstart Linux desktop adoption. Excel and Active Directory are big examples but I'm sure people can come up with others. So users stayed where the software they needed was.
FOSS momentum really began to falter once it became clear that none of the proposed business models that were based on being free and open, OSI style, were working and the money hungry beancounters started moving to faux open source licenses like shared source. But Microsoft had nothing to do with that either other than simply surviving long enough for it to happen.
> "Because Windows is now widely regarded as a pile of shit..."
People eat at McDonalds and drink coffee at Starbucks by the millions every day. It all might be shit but being consistent has a value of its own.
That, and running 73% of the world's desktops. [1]
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
Remember that Microsoft didn't really have an OS that didn't suck yet. Windows as we know it today did not exist, it was still Windows NT 4 and no directory. SQL Server 7 was released in 1998, but until that rewrite it was a product produced in large part another company (Sybase).
Exchange Server (~1996) was the first product Microsoft developed from the ground up to replace an awful product and it was wildly successful, even before real Windows/AD landed in 1999. SQL Server eclipsed Exchange as the flagship product around 2010 or so.
Macs were super popular on Ivy League campuses in the 1980's. Some schools sold Macs to students for $1,000 that retailed for $2,500. Some of the current Fedex Business Centers started as Kinkos locations that rented time on Macs by the hour.
Microsoft changed the education landscape when they offered most of their commercial products for 10% of retail. They also do this for 501c3 non-profits. I believe _students_ get a different discount (~50%).
Especially at the time, saying that both sides were obviously bad people because they had a beef with each other is a little like saying the Dark Side and the Jedi should have just stopped being assholes to each other. It's not that simple.
Waaay too many folks (particularly in places like Mastodon) make "using Linux" the majority of their personality. They live and breathe Linux. Fighting to ensure that "Winblows" users understand that Arch Linux is *THE ONLY WAY!*
God forbid if you use a distro they don't then you're subjected to endless pithy criticism from on high about "well you wouldn't have this problem if you just used my distro!"
Tech felt more nerdy and optimistic. It had its share of problems, but I miss some of the idealism.
Probably true right now too, some are in optimistic times, and others not. Perhaps the proportions of the two groups varies.
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
However, everyone was so busy thinking about being a better version of Windows and Mac that for the most part we didn’t think about phones. Windows and make themselves fell by the wayside to iOS and android.
The N900 was more or less a tiny computer running Debian. With 256MB RAM, and swapping on flash.
It was way too low spec to run reliably like that, you quickly ran into swap death. And it had none of the niceties of Android's memory management, having apps designed to be stopped as needed.
Security-wise it was also bad, it was just a normal Linux box, so banking apps would be a terrible idea.
If it didn't get killed, I wonder how would they have polished it up for public consumption.
And it had a Keyboard! With really real keys!
Yes, on Linux you can replace binaries and libraries in use, but then you're not actually running the new code until you restart the program and are still vulnerable to any security issue that it fixed.
And with things like runtime loading of plugins that now may be incompatible, and programs not expecting stuff changing underneath, online updates can be troublesome.
The online model works well enough for a command line usage where applications are transient, or a server usage where you remember to restart a service or two. But for a desktop user with long lived, huge apps like a browser it's not that good of an idea anymore.
I am aware of them - a friend worked on the N900 - but they were so far off 'phones' I didn't bother.
CPU speed was measured in Mhz not Ghz. CPUs had one core. Memory was measured in MB (not GB) and machines with memory of 32MB or less was the norm. A big-screen was 1024x768 (and most folk didn't have that) and lots-of-color meant 256 colors.
The publically-accessable internet was in its infancy. Connection was through dial ip modem. There was no Google, no social media, no news media.
Most of the businesses we sold software to, we had to source the hardware for them as well. Computers in the home were "common" (but not really used for much apart from games.) And by common I'm thinking 10% or so, not 50%.
So yeah, still very nerdy. You still needed a good grasp of the command line, config of new machines was tricky, IRQ numbers were a thing. My best work was in Assembly language.
And very optimistic. It was clear the best was still to come, and the flaws were seen, but improving all the time. Every year brought new hardware, new software, and new "I didn't know a computer could do that).
Plus we were younger, so much younger than today. The world was our oyster. We might have been nerds, but we had gun working AND got paid to do so. It was a special time and I feel privileged to have lived through it.
Summer of 95 I convinced her to get dialup so I could learn about this internet thing I figured would be big. I was about 2 years too late for that wave.
But yes things were way more primitive and the learning curve was high. I had to spend several hours on the phone with the ISP to get on dialup on Mac. They onboarded people on campus manually and sold Ethernet cards back then.
Well sure, the colleges had the good toys long before the rest of us. But we didn't have college-level money at home or at work.
I left college (and the machines that existed there) in 1992. And the hardware there in 1992 was better than the hardware I had at home or at work for the rest of the 90s.
So yeah, the tech existed, but it wasn't the tech we got to play with again until much later on. By 1998 though we had at least moved away from DOS development into Windows.
Not sure how you’re claiming this but here is an article from 2000 announcing the first 1ghz consumer processor. https://www.zdnet.com/article/its-official-amd-hits-1000mhz-...
Are you saying you were on a mainframe or supercomputer in 95? That’s the only way I could see access to anything approaching those speeds at that time.
Even an sgi workstation you’re looking at 200mhz tops in 95. And no way 1gb of ram more like 64mb.
No you didnt. Process node enabling 1GHz wasnt even invented yet. Afaik fastest CPU at the time was Alpha released in December at 333MHz.
1GB of ram cost $32K in 1995, $2400 in 1997, $1200 in 1998, and back to $2400 in September 1999 due to Jiji earthquake. Just for some perspective 4th place on TOP500 in 1995 had 8GB of ram.
That would be rather 1996. Alphas were already at 500MHz in 1997, and (expensive) Pentium II were at 450MHz in 1998.
To add, lot of us assembled our own PC. Though I didn't build one, I routinely opened the cabinet for upgrading RAM/HDD, or to transfer large files through HDD.I clearly remember when I upgraded RAM from 32MB to 64MB, the speed bump was incredible. After a while it became so frequent that I didn't bother to close the side panel.
A side effect was that computer getting bricked was a normal affair, so we all had boot Floppy disks at hand along with CDs of all the important softwares. In fact I would routinely install things from scratch to get rid of all the freeware stuff that clogged the CPU & RAM.
As you said we were living on the cusp of two revolutionary changes at once, PCs and internet.
I wonder what do youngsters of today look back 20 years down the line and have similar fond feeling & memories.
Irony aside, there are people already saying that the moment AIs have sufficient agency we should give them equal rights and freedoms[^1]. How does one exponentially loses common sense?
we demand that they be relegated to configuring the lp-daemon from just the *man* pages, no internet :o)
That is still true today. PC components are very popular, as are YouTube channel with reviews, ruminations about component choices, build experience and how-to guides .
> A side effect was that computer getting bricked was a normal affair
If you overclocked or messed with the volatges maybe, but otherwise - in my experience (start assembling systems around 1993 or so), bricking was quite rare.
A bricking event is when the computer is more useful as a doorstop than a work tool.
In addition, and popular for a while, was pay-per-minute access where the ISP didn't charge the customer directly, but took part of the phone call cost. I don't know if this method of payment to an ISP existed in the USA.
That far fewer (only 9%) of British households had Internet access was probably more related to the cost of the computer and modem, and the country generally having less wealth than the USA.
Sixteen- and twenty-four-bit color weren't just widespread by 1998. They were standard.
Not supporting 24 bit color was unheard of for a normal desktop monitor and normal desktop graphics.
But by 1998 the pace of hardware changes were moving so fast that anything top of the line from 1994 was just trash, you could get one for free if you asked.
But Windows 3.11 started to change that and by the time Windows 95 was out nobody wanted to use a 2 year old machine anymore.
(Though to be fair most people I knew went from CGA/Hercules straight to VGA, there really wasn't a "driving need" for EGA, especially if your machine was business oriented - Hercules was better for text). VGA was a "sweet spot" also in that it always worked, SVGA started getting really hairy sometimes, and could be a bear to get working right.
Maybe in 800x600, but not in higher resolutions.
A lot of PCs still had 1MB video ram cards like the S3 trio - I remember running Xwindows on a s3 card that would change the colour palette for whichever app was active when you ran it in 1024x768.
Now the only thing I know are compilers :-)
Now here is a mind-boggling thought: there will come a time in the not-too-distant future when today's technology will seem as quaint and primitive as what I have just described.
Will it? In a decade, man landing on the moon will be closer to the first flight by the Wright Brothers than it is to today.
I was about to write a small essay on how everything from monitors to speeds seemed to be stagnating.
But I actually think there is a chance we might gain two new revolutionary[1]ish ways of interacting with computers within the next decade.
LLMs might truly bring us talking computers. Siri is old, and current AI is a fair mix of real advancement and overhyped, but once the dust settles, I wouldn't be surprised if a significant chunk of the population talks with their computer.
XR devices will likely keep shrinking and I figure somebody will find a killer app for them eventually. 20 years ago, a computer sat on a desk. Today I have one in my pocket. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if in 20 years, I have one in my glasses.
Of course, all of this is speculation. And I don't think the PC is threatened, but it will probably face competition from new ways of using computers.
[1]: As in different and not just slightly better than last years model.
I have had a talking computer since 2004.
I've had a computer that listens to me since 2012 when I build my first neural network that could recognize my voice and convert it to bash commands reliably enough.
I've had an LLM powered version of that since the gpt 3 api came up and a local version with a llama 8b model today.
It's meh.
What I find ironic is that even though I'm dictating this to a $50k work station I'm still using Emacs to do it.
But for my grandmother, who keeps a little notebook with detailed instructions for how to message people on Facebook? For her this might greatly increase her capabilities.
We have had voice controlled machines since at least the 80s. There were voice controlled robots in MIT decades ago. It's just stupid and awful.
I wrote about it the other day, but every Windows computer since 2000 has included a fully functional, fairly well implemented, and mostly accurate voice control. Nobody uses it except people who have to use it, because voice is a terrible control plane. Humans are WAY better at choosing an option from a 2D grid using a mouse, even people who are afraid of computers. Voice is inherently slower, less accurate, less precise, and inherently ambiguous.
Hell, even as shown on Star Trek TNG, controlling a computer through your voice is awful. They show a few times characters having to do searches through a bunch of data and refine the output by adding more filter criteria, and always what they do is better done by a good excel spreadsheet.
People don't want voice controlled computers FFS, stop trying to force them. Stop trying to make fetch happen.
That's not a technology issue, so much as a "there is no pressing need to spend the money on this anymore". At the peak of the moon race, NASA was getting 5% of US government spending. In modern terms, that would be like spending 340 billion per year; it's just a _tremendous_ amount of money.
(That said, both the US and China do plan to make manned landings on the moon in the next decade, though the timelines may be... optimistic, as neither is indulging in crazy space-race-esque spending on it.)
As the US medical system shows, you can flush more than that down the toilet every month and still not get any results.
To get things done you need true believers.
It's hard to motivate true believers to build the 1e6th crud app.
This is why no one in mainstream tech is nerdy any more and why all projects are over budget and under performing.
I have a broken memory of the time, because I swear I first came across Google as the better alternative to AltaVista in my last year at Uni in '96, but Wikipedia says Google arrived in '98, or at least the company was set up then, is it possible it was usable 2 years before they incorporated?
Sounds like a Mandela effect. :-)
I saw Sergei give a talk at my university in 96 or 97 and switched from Alta Vista.
Exhibit A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
(Also don't make the mistake of thinking that these groups continually fighting over how the centralized power is used means that any one of them is aligned with individual freedom)
It costs even more to be reckless today.
Re: "whitey on the moon" - I'm not sure the space program would be my first target there but I think it makes a more poetic contrast and forces people to pay attention by targeting a beloved cultural narrative. Cyberpunk - by my reckoning a bit later - has been preaching a very similar message of massive inequality in the presence of incredible technology and wealth disparity and power concentration. And yet that doesn't draw the same ire. I guess in that case it's easier to dismiss the core message because robot limbs and cool neon lights are too much of a distraction.
It was pretty cool when it worked. I think I managed to serve a website from it and I used it as a fancy teletype.
MacOS 8.6 and Windows 95 OSR2.1 (the one that had good USB support, but no IE yet). Back then I loved to tweak my OS'es, I totally stripped them from anything it didn't need, tweaked the animations to be instant. Dual Celly 300A@450.
I think I installed a Windows 2000 beta somewhere in 1999 and stuck with that until they really ended support for it. Pretty consistent UI, lightweight. Ran most software including games, even when not officially supported.
Played with the MacOS X Betas, on hardware comparable to the first iPhone in terms of performance. Blue White G3 Tower.
I loved computers back then. Now they're just tools.
Preach it brother. I lived through Windows v. *nix (several versions), z80 v 6502, ethernet v. token ring, packet switching v. circuit switching, and a ton of others[1], and was usually a partisan on one side or the other. Now...it's either 'what works easiest' or 'what does the client want' and I make it work for me. This lack of participation in partisan conflict has made most everything go smoother. And vintage computing allows me to get my "remember how much fun it once was" fix.
[1] Yes, even vi v. emacs, but even 30 years ago that had become more of an inside joke than actual debate. Besides, those emacs heretics will never find the One True Way.
My memory of 1998 is that 64mb-128mb was common by then.
Around then my main machine had 128mb, until 2001 when I switched to 256mb and a 1ghz cpu. I also had an older machine with 8mb that was given to me for free. I recompiled OpenBSD to exclude PCI support to get it to stop swapping, then it was pretty usable as a headless machine.
Microsoft was the big bad wolf, but at the time, most of what they did that was so horrible was capture market share. You could still use a computing device and then leave it alone and it would leave you alone, it wasn't trying to constantly ping you and notify you and make you feel left out and use all kinds of dark patterns to feed the addiction. These days, computing devices feel more like trickster adversaries than clunky-but-useful tools.
Not so fast. They've been at it for a while.
It was a time when you could be in some place outside the big meccas like SV and start a reasonably succesful company around simply developing some software package and selling it to a small to midsized companies in your region.
Even in big non-tech companies, tech people kind of were left alone in a distant building and as long as you had a suit and a tie for the very ocasional meetings with the civilized portion of your company you were mostly left alone.
Then, the business people started to slowly encroach into our domain, the project management people, their processess. I think that a lot of the early agile movement was kind of a immune reaction against it, until it was too coopted by the suit people.
Then the marketing consolidated and concentrated, and it was never the same since then.
If you're in a hiring position it's important to be very, very selective about who you hire into any engineering management or even more agile-specific roles. I remembering interviewing for an "agile coach" in a previous role - the CTO thought we needed one - and the first two or three were basically the same: all had their acronyms and their flavours of how they'd memorised agile literature. Then one guy came in who did know all that, but was also ex-British Army and had a load of practical, insightful things to say. And that's who we picked, and he later became the head of engineering. Useful agile knowledge is practical and insightful. It's not theory.
You only get to execute the nuclear option once (i.e. quit) so yes you need to understand where the line is, but there's almost always a better option.
You're also making the (bad) bet that the disaster will be small enough to not wipe out the company but big enough that management notices.
Alas, 'twas not to be. SGI, you glorious bastard, why did you have to make that deal with the devil ..
IMHO, the tech industry completely changed when nerds could by tiBooks, have an amazing Unix experience in a portable form, and still rip and play DVD's alongside the shell ..
For those who do, it's a competent Unix OS and certainly does the job. I never found IRIX great for servers either.
It was a huge surprise that the Fruit Company were the ones to come out with really robust, affordable (at the time) Unix-based laptops .. all the issues with Irix would have become relatively irrelevant had SGI built the laptop and had their Linux team work on the case.
Ah well, an alternative timeline I will visit when the technology to do so becomes more widely available. ;)
I imagine what they’d look like today. Now sure how to translate their 90’s graphics language to the 2020’s though. Hard edges, rich textures, and colorful machines.
I went back to Linux around 4.8 because FreeBSD started having issues with my hardware. By then I had "real" internet thanks to the company I worked for.
I remember seeing items about this, but the BSD people tended not to care about these things. But a nice look back
During the summer of 2004 I took an introductory computer science course at Sacramento City College. The professor was a big fan of FreeBSD. He convinced me to try it instead of Gentoo, and he gave me some CDs that he burned containing FreeBSD and plenty of FOSS software. I ended up installing FreeBSD on my PC, and I fell in love with it. It was my daily-driver OS until the summer of 2006, when I was able to use some of my internship earnings to purchase a MacBook, my first brand-new computer and my first modern Mac. I still use FreeBSD whenever I need a Unix and when I don’t need to use Linux-specific software.
You just had to endlessly swap between the different CDs because the dependency resolution wasn't very smart about that. Fun stuff :-)
I've tried it over they years and finally gave up. It would work for awhile, until some random change would break something I used every day and I wasn't interested in spending many hours trying to research a fix and manually hack some .c file to make it work.
MacOS essentially became a form of Unix with a fantastic GUI. It's what Linux could have been. I like to use Linux with the windows WSL and I get the best of both worlds: a nice GUI and the ability to run all of my favorite Linux apps.
My experience with the desktops across all the OSes largely similar. They do things differently, but once you get used to the OS, it becomes second nature.
Linux is my preferred environment for anything to do with development. I use my Windows machine for office productivity (Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint browsing) and VisualStudio. I use my Mac for the Adobe creative suite and Figma and iOS/visionOS development.
The difference in OSes isn't the desktop itself. It's the software that runs on it. I don't really want use GIMP on Linux for example, or do web dev on Windows.
If you really want to use MacOS's smooth scrolling, use MOS (https://mos.caldis.me) and get a beefy Mac because the base models will stutter like I mentioned.
Personally, I find any development on Windows to be a pain!
It was never great-- there was always bloat, but recently it's crossed a line of unusability where the OS itself is more distracting than useful.
Meanwhile, with Libreoffice, it just works.
I always admired Linux, and was able to get around in Linux, but never seriously considered using it until that MS AI thing that works by taking a screenshot every couple of seconds. And now this pester-ware asking for my location.
OTOH, Windows has never given me anything but trouble... stuff that's easy on Linux semi-frequently required regedit hacks. I remember having to mess with some DCOM thing and ended up hosing my Windows install. Not to mention that it's awfully slow without installing a bunch of debloating tools (and even then...).
I've been using Linux exclusively as a desktop environment at home for 5 years or more and my primary pain point is kernel updates breaking DisplayLink, via a docking stattion I use for multiple monitors. I now have a specific command line that rolls back the kernel to the previous version, and then I wait for updated DisplayLink drivers.
It's a pain, but it's still (much!) better than the circles of hell that Windows has been putting users through since Windows 7.
Strangely, the Windows laptop provided by my work just stopped being able to pipe audio through the speakers plugged into the docking station. Which feels like Windows "doing a Linux". The tables are turning?