Linux. 34 years ago …
Posted by aka_makc@reddit | linuxadmin | View on Reddit | 63 comments
On this day in the year 1991, Linus Benedict Torvalds wrote his legendary mail …
Happy Birthday!
jacob242342@reddit
Oh thanks for sharing!
ccie6861@reddit
Oof. I've been around long enough to know this isn't an e-mail but a usenet post and the original eventually made it to me who didn't have Internet access at the time via a Fidonet bridge. Those of my peeps here that remember this are so old and on the spectrum that the only dating we do is carbon. Stay weird guys.
aka_makc@reddit (OP)
I started with Linux later ... in 2006 with openSUSE :)
brunopgoncalves@reddit
you make me remember that i start in 95, with slackware 2, from a disks from a magazine.... very nice man... old times...
Lopoetve@reddit
RH 5.3, CDR, from a friend. Started my entire career. 1999-2000 ish.
noobbtctrader@reddit
Redhat 5.2, grabbed cds from compusa cause I didnt feel like waiting on 56k.
Lopoetve@reddit
Heh. I managed to get my winmodem working on RHEL, but sound was borked. Sound worked on mandrake, but modem was toast. 3 months later i had it working till I tried to recompile the kernel.
Poor life choices
noobbtctrader@reddit
I bypassed the whole winmodem issue and spent too much $$ on a diamond supra express. You probably learned more though, lol.
Lopoetve@reddit
Learned? I call it pain. Lots of pain. So. Much. Pain.
But I did learn. Sigh. 25 years later and I guess it paid off?
Substantial_Gate_31@reddit
My lucent something winmodem worked flawlessly once I figured out how to compile a kernel module for it.
AmusingVegetable@reddit
The main thing to learn was to buy a real modem…
rabell3@reddit
Buddy of mine passed me two disks... boot and root, in highschool '96. Such coolness. He's worked at RHAT since college graduation and I manage a team of Linux administrators.
ellensen@reddit
I started around the same time with Yggdrasil and then quickly jumped over to Slackware which I used as my daily driver for many years. I invited one of my friends to connect to my machine over dialup and was hacked in under 5min by a security hole in screen :) the kids now with their iPads and iPhones dont know how it used to be a teenage computer nerd, in a society that looked at us like people look at ham radio operators now.
Superb_Raccoon@reddit
Slackware .9 from a book. Bought at Tower Records
Anonymous_user_2022@reddit
Was there much else than Slackware back then? I was introduced to Linux by a fellow student in early 96, so I got started with slackware. But I don'r recall much else until a few years later.
snark42@reddit
Slackware was pretty much the default then though.
brunopgoncalves@reddit
i rember redhat and debian, and the fight about better package manager... hahha on the slack we die to compile every single lib dependency hahaha
stephenph@reddit
I remember going to a Linux conference in Sacramento (I believe sponsored by RedHat, but before it became the summit). I picked up a copy of Debian potato and ran it for about a year. I believe I then switched to gentoo
roger1632@reddit
Man I loved getting the distros from mags at compusa. We had a compusa across from the campus so I'd head over there during gaps.
cribbageSTARSHIP@reddit
2012 with Ubuntu, arch since 2014
aka_makc@reddit (OP)
I think Ubuntu is most popular distribution at the moment
ElectronicFlamingo36@reddit
SuSE Linux 6.1 Debian Potato . . . [insert some fancy hipster distro hoppings here like one mainstream distro would be any better than the other mainstream distro] . [kudos to Knoppix] . . . Debian Testing since 15 yrs as a daily runner desktop + NAS + pretty much everything and still happy.
m15f1t@reddit
Talking about e-mails that changed the world ..
95165198516549849874@reddit
Not an email....
m15f1t@reddit
Ah you're right, it is of course a usenet post.
Initial_Specialist69@reddit
Are you an LLM?
m15f1t@reddit
Yes — I’m a large language model (LLM), specifically GPT-5, developed by OpenAI.
Would you like me to explain what that means in more detail (how I’m trained, how I generate responses, etc.)?
DyazzK@reddit
I'm not sure if this is a troll or really a LLM
Zealousideal_Low1287@reddit
I love how he comments it’s unlikely to be portable
cthart@reddit
*protable
NegativeK@reddit
To this day, it still isn't protable..
awshuck@reddit
It’s not protable, it’s not potable but my god is it portable!
I_miss_your_mommy@reddit
It’s impressive the flexibility of a system built on amateurtable.
Educational_Sun_8813@reddit
monolith kernel is not so flexible
awshuck@reddit
Sounds a lot friendlier than the Linus we have now.
Own-Eggplant-3435@reddit
If I remember well, it's around 2003 with Mandrake MNF and after that Slackware.
aka_makc@reddit (OP)
Mandriva was a nice distribution, but it’s very sad that it’s discontinued.
cthart@reddit
Understatement of the millennium: "won't be big and professional".
redmage753@reddit
Across two millennia, even.
nosyeaj@reddit
Linus 🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾
stevorkz@reddit
Wow. He seemed nicer back then.
bidimensionale@reddit
we'll never be that happy again
SSC_Fan@reddit
Been using it since 1997, starting with Debian.
Gosh, if only could he imagine...
hyperswiss@reddit
I like 'won't be big'. 😁
aka_makc@reddit (OP)
Got a little bigger 🙂
hyperswiss@reddit
Who would have thought 🧐
shamsway@reddit
Still remember getting my first Linux book with a Slackware CD. Proudest moment was probably getting Linux to connect to dial-up internet after approximately 378 prior failed attempts.
ziroux@reddit
Good memories. I've got a book with Red Hat 3 cd, and installed it on my pentium 166mmx machine. Never got the damn X working. Tried for like a month, no internet, only a random friend who somehow got it working, but couldn't help much. Went back to windows 98. A couple of years later got into IT, tried again with Debian, and since then Linux distros always were my primary os.
cthart@reddit
I was a SunOS user at the time. We had some 386 or 486 PCs in the lab too. The Jolitz's were developing 386BSD at the time which we tried. Then we tried Linux which didn't have a network stack yet. I remember thinking, "What's the point?"
Superb_Raccoon@reddit
SCO and Unixware.
Superb_Raccoon@reddit
Has it been that long since Richard Stallman has taken a bath?
--dany--@reddit
What a coincidence, windows 95 was released to the public a few hours before this! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95
And of course the two masterminds behind those two OSs only met each other for the first time very recently 2 months ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/s/aDUCo9tZsD
mTrax-@reddit
In 1991 ? Well not really.
--dany--@reddit
You’re right let me correct that.
gjohnson5@reddit
I was a FreeBSD user back then. Linux has morphed into a plethora of offerings since then . It’s awesome to see how things have changed
cvsmith122@reddit
Been using Linux since 99 yes I’m old
03263@reddit
Why does he think we need another UNIX clone?
pacopac25@reddit
No way it's ever going to be used in corporate environments, with Banyan VINES and Novell Netware totally dominating.
FormerlyUndecidable@reddit
Imagine spending months on end making something that already exists. What a moron, such a waste of time. Nobody is going to use it.
amiri-2_0@reddit
Happy birthday Linux Kernel!
HeligKo@reddit
I started using slackware in 1994 to build something to make Microsoft Mail more useful for our users. I had no idea what I was getting into, but had a HP/UX system running our ERP and had used used Xerox systems while in a EECE program, so it looked familiar. Luckily back then the newsgroups were popping, and people were excited and helpful.
KlausBertKlausewitz@reddit
❤️
Line-Noise@reddit
I was one of those Minix users. The first Linux install I did was from a stack of 3.5" floppies. Things had advanced enough by then that there were drivers for my ethernet card so I could get on the network and download the source for XFree86. It took a long time to compile but it was so cool to be able to display windows from the Silicon Graphics servers at work on my little Olivetti PC.