For those veteran linux people, what was it like back in 90s? I did see and hear of Unix systems being available for use but I did not see much apart from old versions of Debian in use.
Were they prominent in education like universities? Was it mainly a hobbyist thing at the time compared to the business needs of 98, 95 and classic mac?
I ask this because I found out that some PC games I owned were apparently also on Linux even in CD format from a firm named Loki.
Everything was harder back then - even when using Windows. But you had to be a real masochist to run Linux.
Computers were still quite new that most people had no real use for them beyond “work things”. Only nerds really used them for anything else. “Do you have an email address” isn’t a question you ask today.
“Kids these days” don’t realize how easy they have it when it comes to just general comparability. There weren’t a lot of standards yet and vendors had proprietary drivers and offered no support AT ALL for “lye nux”. You had to do a ton of research and fiddling to figure out if there was any support for your specific version of a specific chip used by any peripheral you used. And then to discover that you had to patch your kernel to add a driver that somebody had bodged together. So now you were running your own fun custom-kernel so you could get full-duplex rather than simplex audio! But it works!
Like - lets say today you want to buy an external IDE drive controller to plug in some old drives to for backup. You to to Amazon, search “USB external IDE enclosure” and buy the cheapest one you find. It probably works unless it’s defective. In '95 USB and Firewire were in their infancy so you would probably buy a serial or parallel port device. You would need to find whether Linux supported the specific version of the thing you wanted to buy, what tools there would be for it, etc. There was no standard “bulk storage device” driver that you could rely on or hope the vendor would implement. Even if you were an early adopter and got a USB or Firewire device it might have some “basic” functionality that works with OSS drivers but you couldn’t use all of it.
Vendors back then also shipped their own software with things, not just drivers. It was always just the absolute worst crap that was buggy as shit. But it would do a lot of the heavy lifting in working with their device. Like any Creative Labs audio player you wanted to get working. Sure it used USB but it didn’t just mount as storage device, you needed to use the worst GUI ever put before mankind to use it (under Windows). Under Linux you had to find a specific tool that would support pushing/pulling media from it. These days it would just mount as a drive automatically and you’d use standard desktop tools to interact with it.
Even with DOS/Windows you’d buy a game and as you came home from the store with it in a box wonder “will this work on my computer and how long will I need to mess with it?” I had to configure a specific CD-ROM driver to be used by DOS just to run Tie Fighter vs. X-Wing for example. Had a special boot floppy just for that game since that driver didn’t work with literally anything else I had.
Hardware just generally didn’t “auto configure”. “Plug 'n Play” was still very much in its infancy and you often had to manually configure hardware and install special drivers just for a particular card or peripheral.
IRQ 7 DMA 220. I probably just triggered some folks. If you were setting up a “Sound Blaster or compatible” then you had to know what interrupt it used (7) and what address it was on on the direct-memory bus (220). And you hoped there wasn’t a conflict with something else. If there was then there would be a DIP switch you could use to change the base memory address or IRQ from the default. But you were telling your software where to find the card.
USB was a f’ing game changer for peripherals. Serial and parallel ports were so slow and obnoxious to use. Before that there was no real way to “probe” the bus to discover what was there unless you knew exactly what you were looking for (there’s no lsusb for serial ports). So you just guessed at the driver you need and “modprob foo” hoping it worked.
It’s amazing what 20ish years of just developing standards has done.
If you want a taste of that world I highly recommend LGR on YouTube. He’s mostly Windows focused but look for videos where he tries out “oddware” to see how often he has trouble getting things to work on period hardware using the vendor-supplied software even. Then multiply that by 100x for Linux. :-)
LoL!!! IRQ 5 DMA 220 for me. Had to manually adjust the jumper on the sound card.
Fucking hell…
Port 220.
IRQ 5, port 220h, DMA 1 was what I used for my SoundBlaster 2.
Later I used IRQ 5, port 220h, DMA 1, high DMA 5 for my SoundBlaster 16.
Do you think it’s worth getting a Sound Blaster card today? I’ve read you can get better sound effects in game. Can’t the on board audio chips do that now?
I was reading your wall of text chomping at the bit to complain about IRQs and dip switches but you covered even that!
Oh wait, you didn’t include having a math coprocessor daughter boards! I barely remember them but remember my dad building computers with them.
I kinda wish I was a teen when the first computer kits were coming out. And phone phreaking.
I wasn’t that into computers at that point in my life, but it was definitely a time where “computers” was a hobby, in the same way that restoring old motorcycles was/is a hobby. Sure, you might take it out for a spin every now and again, but a lot more time is spent tinkering than simply using.
I’m constantly amazed by how much better the end-user experience is today, even just from 10 years ago. The installers are better, the pre-configured software and settings are more thoughtfully chosen, and now we’re at the beginnings of meaningful Linux gaming for non-hobbyists.
We truly stand upon the shoulders of giants, and I look forward to the future.
I remember buying a bunch of old HP ISA 100Mbit NICs to turn an old computer into a router/server combo. Naive as I was I put them all in and nothing worked. Turns out they were all configured to use the same IRQ (since they likely came from independent machines), and that caused them to overwrite each others settings… including the MAC adress. Thankfully I found some nice hacker that worked with these cards before and published a little C tool to rewrite their EEPROMs. I contacted him if he sees a chance to resurrect the cards and that saint indeed hacked the necessary features into his tool so I could rewrite the MAC adresses, change the IRQ one by one and ended up with a working network. Good times.
Even if you were an early adopter and got a USB or Firewire device it might have some “basic” functionality that works with OSS drivers but you couldn’t use all of it.
Oh, like scanners still.
This. However from about the release of knoppix and ubuntu things started looking and feeling a lot more like they are today. – I credit that to Knoppix for X & filesystem work and Ubuntu for setup and everything desktop.
So even though late 90s it was tough, it was nothing like mid 90s. But by around 2004-2005ish the install and setup was substantially easier however the reputational damage still exists to today.
I remember spending a lot of time in XFree86 config files, re-configuring it trying to figure out what works best on my monitor, and then the migration to XOrg. All good times.
There was however a substantial amount of hype around Linux. It wasn’t quite what it is with AI. But you couldn’t read a magazine without encountering it in some way, but it was the type of hype were everyone knew of it but few people had anything to do with it.
Another thing that hadn’t been mentioned is that there was a new distribution cropping up every day or so. (It felt like at least.) But this seems to back up that statement: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg
Ah, yes, Linux around the turn of the century. Let’s see…
GPU acceleration? In your dreams. Only some cards had drivers, and there were more than 2 GPU manufacturers back then, too… We had ATi, nVidia, 3dfx, Cirrus, Matrox, Via, Intel… and almost everyone held their driver source cards close to their chest.
Modems? Not if they were “winmodems”, which had no hardware controller, the CPU and the Windows driver (which was always super proprietary) did all the hard work.
Sound? AC’97 software audio was out of the question. See above. You had to find a sound blaster card if you wanted to get audio to work right.
So, you know how modern linux has software packages? Well, back then, we had Slackware, and it compiled everything gentoo style back then. In addition, everyone had a hardon for " compiling from source is better"… so your single core Pentium II had to take its time compiling on a UDMA66-connected hard drive, constrained with 32 or 64 MB RAM. Updating was an overnight procedure.
RedHat and Debian were godsends for people who didn’t want to waste their time compiling… which unfortinately was more common even so, because a lot of software was source only.
Oh, and then MP3 support was ripped out of RedHat in Version 9 iirc, the last version before they split it into RHEL and Fedora. RIP music.
As for Linux on a Mac, there was Yellowdog, which supported the PPC iMacs and such. It was decently good, but I had to write my own x11 monitor settings file (which I still have on a server somewhere, shockingly, I should throw it on github or somewhere) to get the screen to line up and work right.
Basically, be glad Linux has gone from the “spend a considerable amount of time and have programming / underhood linux knowledge to get it working” to “insert stick, install os, start using it” we have now.
In addition, everyone had a hardon for " compiling from source is better"
I mean, optimization had more of an impact on the weak CPU’s back then, no?
It was a struggle. You went to buy some device and you had to check it was not one of those windows-only ones. Modems were particularly bad, for example.
You had to read the how-tos and figure things out. Mailing lists and newsgroups were the only places to find some help.
You had to find the shop willing to honour warranty on the parts and not on the whole system, as they had no knowledge of Linux at all. But once you found them, you were a recurring customer so they were actually happy. You might even have ended up showing them memtest86!
You would still be able to configure the kernel and be able to actually know some of those names, compilation would take several hours but it was a learning experience.
You could interact with very helpful kernel developers and get fixes to test.
You could have been the laughing stock of your circles of friends, but within you, you knew who’d have had the last laugh.
And yes, Loki games had some titles working on Linux natively, Railroad Tycoon was one. Too bad they were ahead of the times and didn’t last much.
windows-only ones. Modems
And, of course, they’d almost never actually SAY that on the box, so you had to see if you could look at what exact chip was on them and explain to a retail employee why you needed to look in the box, and that no, you certainly weren’t doing something sketchy, you just use Linux instead of wait why are you calling security…
Way back in the early 90s I needed to use LaTeX for university. The dos version was awful and couldn’t handle large documents. So the options were (1) a nextcube for $$$$, (2) Nextstep 3.3 for PCs for $$$ (some faculty had this), or (3) linux. So I downloaded slackware on dozens of disks.
You had to configure the kernel, which wasn’t too hard since the autoconfig walked you through it. The hardest part was setting up X11, which required a lot of manual config, and if you screwed up the timings you could destroy a CRT monitor. OpenStep was an option, so there was a moderately friendly windowmanager available.
Learning Emacs was also fairly unpleasant, but that was the best option for editing TeX at the time.
Everything would work, until it suddenly would break. But nonetheless I was somehow able to get that thesis done.
Ugh, modern linux is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much better
Just to add to this, early on there was no such thing as kernel modules, so you had to compile your own kernel with the hardware support you needed for anything beyond basic (if I remember it correctly, it was only basic processor stuff, keyboard and text mode VGA) hardware support.
So I downloaded slackware on dozens of disks.
This is no joke. When I downloaded Slackware in '95 or '96, it was over 100 3.5" floppies of 1.44 MB each. And there were still more available, those were just the ones I thought I’d need. And before you could even begin installing, each of those had to be downloaded, written and verified because floppies were not terribly reliable.
Slackware and Red Hat were the two distros in use in the mid 90s.
My local city used proper UNIX, and my university had IRIXworkstations SPARCstations and SunOS servers. We used Linux at my ISP to handle modem pools and web/mail/news servers. In the early 2000s we had Linux labs, and Linux clusters to work on.
Linux on the desktop was a bit painful. There were no modules. Kernels had to fit into main memory. So you’d roll your own kernel with just the drivers you needed. XFree86 was tricky to configure with timings for your CRT monitors. If done wrong, you could break your monitor.
I used FVWM2 and Enlightenment for many years. I miss Enlightenment.
that was the last time i contributed; i created a LCARS port and now there are hundreds of them everywhere.
How wrong did you have to be to break your monitor? Because I’m positive I got it very wrong a whole lot of times and never managed that.
By the late 90’s most monitors were smart enough to detect when sync speed was too far off and not try to display an image.
It was the old monitors that only supported a single or fixed set of scan rates that you had to worry about damaging. Some could be very picky and others were more tolerant.
If done wrong, you could break your monitor.
You mean your graphic drivers, right? not your actual hardware?
(edit: oh no)
@andrewth09 I bricked a monitor when I tried to fiddle with the graphics settings in Linux back in the late 90s (tried to get it to run on 1280*1024 - which was considered “hi resolution” back then). I had to buy a new monitor. Then installed Windows and only returned to Linux a long time after that.
