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Linux during the mid to late 90s (Windows 95 and 98 era)

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.

jerkface ,
@jerkface@lemmy.ca avatar

Ah, the golden age. I dunno, I was running FreeBSD. It was awesome. It still is.

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

I tried slackwear in '94. Getting it running was no big deal, but I had zero experience and documentation / help guides were thin. Installing applications or getting peripherals to work was prohibitively difficult without having a pretty decent amount of knowledge about it.

My high school had a rather large dose/novell Network but there was no internet yet. BBS’s were a thing and you could get a lot of installers and information from them. But they were all running in dos for the most part

My college had a VAX, it was more or less there just to get email and power a metric ass load of terminals in the library for research purposes. They really tried to keep you out of the CLI, everything was menued. I figured out that you could go for it to a South African University about seven times in a row and it would explode and give you a telnet session, but even then I wasn’t really working with an OS shell. The school had a computer lab. It was all Windows 3 and Novell, No internet for the longest time.

My ISP had options to dial up into a terminal session. My home dial up line was awful. Trying to FTP over PPP was a fool’s errand. I started getting used to connecting to my ISP and FTPing files down to their local node on with their T1 and then switching over to z modem to download the files to my house with the ability to auto restart on failure.

I didn’t try to run a Linux based OS again until Gnome came out.

johant ,

Heard about linux from someone at school in -95, I was 15 at the time. No idea where he had heard about it. Brought a stack of floppy disks and downloaded slackware on a school computer. Of course some of the disks had read errors so had to copy them again the next day but eventually I got slackware installed. In spring of -96 redhat 3.0.3 was released which I for some reason bought the full version of, still have the box in my bookcase. Since then I have been a pretty much 100% linux desktop user. Well 95% since I was dual booting windows for games for a long time.

I spent a lot of time back then learning linux by experimentation and hanging out on IRC talking to people about linux. As others have said, you had to compile the kernel because there were no kernel modules (had forgotten about that!) and I remember being quite fast in navigating the kernel configuration menus. I wouldn’t even know where to start nowadays! :)

SeikoAlpinist , (edited )

It was kind of an upstart thing and people were trying to find ways to monetize it.

My first Linux was Red Hat on a 486 in 1998 and it was different than I was used to. I was a kid who didn’t know how to startx so I just emailed a developer using pine and they helped me figure out and choose a window manager. Nobody even got mad at this barely teenager just emailing dumb questions. I got lost with fvwm95 and afterstep. I tried every window manager, mlvwm, qvwm, IceWM, etc but ended up liking blackbox the most. I had 12MB of RAM on my first Linux system, 1MB of vram and 256 colors. We were all sarcastic in a cringe, adolescent way but everyone was friendly and helpful.

There was this fascination with monkeys in pop culture, but not real monkeys --chimps and gorillas. People would throw monkey in their username or in some random nu-metal song for some reason. There were monkeys you could download for your desktop. There was this thing by PC gamer called coconut monkey. I don’t know what that’s all about. And anyway I associate this period with the foot logo of Gnome, which was unprofessional but that was the point. Also, gimp was a funny name for an app (its cringe today), and PAN stood for pimp ass news.

I discovered Slashdot and Freshmeat and Sourceforge and kuro5hin. Usenet groups were great back then. So was irc. I trolled Slashdot and got negative karma and for the next 15 years before we all moved to SoylentNews, my comments started at -1.

Nobody knew how to pronounce Linux. Some people said Line-X because his name was Linus like on Charlie Brown, and some people said Leenucks.

At some point it became a corporate thing and the term Linux was everywhere. Randomly on magazine covers. There was also this divide, almost marketing driven, it seemed that people who liked warez and whatever started to love Microsoft and shit on Linux. So gamers especially started to shit talk and that’s the first time that being a computer nerd wasn’t like this unifying concept, there was an us versus them divide. People who could compile code they wrote and who were genuinely curious versus people who just wanted to download a bunch of shit and show you how big their start menu was and play games. I think this divide still exists.

There was a bunch of commercial software for Linux too. Metro-X, Accelerated X, Motif, Applixware, Star Office. Descent 3. One of the Quakes. Motif, the toolkit, looked amazing. I thought CDE with themes was the coolest looking thing ever. But I couldn’t afford CDE so I used XFce which was an XForms knockoff. And then enlightenment came along and pushed the boundaries of what we thought a desktop would be. Also, I was able to drag console windows with transparency on that 486 on e16.

Debian kind of had an elitist community and talked down to people so I never used it. I liked Slackware the most and spent a weekend downloading the floppies over a dialup connection. That led to me discovering FreeBSD in 1999, which I stuck with for almost a decade.

Later, a comp sci student, I didn’t see Linux at university in the labs. It was Solaris and macOS in the mid 2000s. Eventually, the Solaris computers were shut down and replaced with more Macs.

My girlfriend’s Windows ME computer was so full of spyware so I installed SuSE with KDE on it for her in her dorm. And she was able to do her papers in AbiWord. And 20+ years later we are married and it all worked out.

I finally switched to Debian stable about 4 years ago and have no complaints. It’s a lot easier now.

Edit: A couple more things: I started using Linux because I was very poor and it was free and Windows 95 was a mess on my system. I mean dirt roads and no water for long periods of time. My 486 in 1998 was sort of old already and it came with 8mb of RAM as a hand me down in 1995, but I was dumpster diving outside a community college when I was 12 and found an IBM PS/2 and stole the 30 pin SIMMs out of it. And one of them worked in my 486 computer so I ended up with 12mb of RAM. I overclocked it to 100mhz. That 486 got me through high school and into college where I ended up with an AMD system with a pirated Thai RM233 Windows 2000. But I went back to FreeBSD because I needed a compiler. So that kind of knowledge was useful and now that I have a good career from what I learned, I have donated a lot of money over the years to different projects. Also I make sure my kids have only ever known Linux and Gnome and it works fine for them.

InfiniteKrebs ,

Wow, thanks for sharing all that, was well written and really allowed for a peek into what it was like!

Kiloee ,

I am a 90s child, so I don’t completely fit your timespan, but I remember the first PC with SuSe Linux that I built with my father from old server hardware he got from his job.

Back then his job used unix and it was pretty common in his field of work. So Linux was the natural choice for a home pc. SuSe was popular back then, I think mainly because it came on CDs and had books available.

One of the main things I remember is the hassle with network drivers, having to download them on a working pc first.

Aceticon , (edited )

In the early 90s all the “cool kids” (for a techie definition of “cool”, i.e. hackers) at my University (a Technical one in Portugal with all the best STEM degrees in the country) used Linux - it was actually a common thing for people to install it in the PCs of our shared computer room.

Later in that decade it was already normal for it to be used in professional environments for anything serving web pages (static or dynamic) along with Apache: Windows + IIS already had a lower fraction of that Market than Linux + Apache.

If I remember it correctly in the late 90s RedHat started providing their Enterprise Version with things like Support Contracts - so beloved by the Corporates who wanted guarantees that if their systems broke the supplier would fix them - which did a lot to boost Linux use on the backend for non-Tech but IT heavy industries.

I would say this was the start of the trend that would ultimately result in Linux dominating on the server-side.

erwan , (edited )

I have to say, as a Linux fan in the 90’s it was very cool to see Linux eating the whole server space, replacing older Unix while Microsoft tried desperately to grow Windows on the server market.

Aceticon ,

I was already a dev in a small IT consultancy by the end of the decade, and having ended up as “one of the guys you go to for web-based interfaces”, I did my bit pushing Linux as a solution, though I still had to use IIS on one or two projects (even had to use Oracle Web Application Server once), mainly because clients trusted Microsoft (basically any large software vendor, such as Microsoft, IBM or Oracle) but did not yet trust Linux.

That’s why I noticed the difference that Red Hat with their Enterprise version and Support Plans did on the acceptability of Linux.

ace_garp ,
@ace_garp@lemmy.world avatar

I used it in a university course in '95, not sure what distro, but customising your shell prompt, and setting automatic timed updates for the wallpaper in tvwm certainly felt like the future. Different and electric.

We would play the linux shareware first release of quake in 12-16 player. Hiding the executable by renaming it ekauq… didn’t work, still got removed from our directories.

There were installfests at the local LUG, which were a fun way to share tips and help others.

One Linux support business existed in our town in the 90s, installing and fixing Linux boxen for businesses. Mostly home/hobby use though.

Slashdot.org was covering the majority of Linux news. Either MS FUD or the nonsense SCO lawsuit, amongst all the positive advances.

Linux conferences were a fun way to make it more real and see many of the big names behind the movement and technologies.

Installed RedHat 4 or 5.1 around 98 and then found the power of Debian. Currently running Trisquel GNU/Linux because it is a fully libre distro with no proprietary blobs or other obfuscated parts.

Many thanks to RMS and all FLOSS contributors, there is such an incredible spectrum of tools available for free use. It has been great to see the progression and expansion over the decades.

IsoKiero ,

There’s already a ton of great examples which I can relate (I’ve been using linux since 1998 or 99) but maybe the biggest difference today, apart from that everything is SO MUCH EASIER now, is that the internet wasn’t really the thing it is today. Specially the bandwidth. It took hours and hours over the phone line to download anything, on a good day you could get 100MB just under 4 hours. Of course things were a lot smaller too back then, but it still took ages and I’m pretty sure I now have more bandwidth on my home connection than most of the local universities had back in the 90s.

SteveDinn ,
@SteveDinn@lemmy.ca avatar

I remember running Slackware and having to recompile the kernel for just about any hardware you added. I configured a box to be used as a router before routers were something you could get commonly at Best Buy.

I was taking comp. sci. at university and all our work was done on Sparc workstations. Having a Unix-like machine at home was a great help during that time

porl ,

Hearing your monitor squeal when you got the modelines wrong was fun.

gari_9812 ,

Could you please elaborate? I’ve no idea what that sentence means, so it sounds really wild to me 😅

possiblylinux127 ,

Squreeee

IsoKiero ,

Back when CRT monitors were a thing and all this fancy plug’n’play technology wasn’t around you had modelines on your configuration files which told the system what kind of resolutions and refresh rates your actual hardware could support. And if you put wrong values there your analog and dumb monitor would just try to eat them as is with wildly different results. Most of the time it resulted just in a blank screen but other times the monitor would literally squeal when it attempted to push components well over their limits. And in extreme cases with older monitors it could actually physically break your hardware. And everything was expensive back then.

Fun times.

Aceticon ,

CRT monitors internally use an electron gun which just fires electrons at the phosporous screen (from, the back, obviously, and the whole assembly is one big vacuum chamber with the phosporous screen at the front and the electron gun at the back) using magnets to twist the eletcron stream left/right and up/down.

In practice the way it was used was to point it to the start of a line were it would start moving to the other side, then after a few clock ticks start sending the line data and then after as many clock ticks as there were points on the line, stop for a few ticks and then swipe it to the start of the next line (and there was a wait period for this too).

Back in those days, when configuring X you actually configured all this in a text file, low level (literally the clock frequency, total lines, total points per line, empty lines before sending data - top of the screen - and after sending data as well as OFF ticks from start of line before sending data and after sending data) for each resolution you wanted to have.

All this let you defined your own resolutions and even shift the whole image horizontally or vertically to your hearts content (well, there were limitations on things like the min and max supported clock frequency of the monitor and such). All that freedom also meant that you could exceed the capabilities of the monitor and even break it.

nucleative ,

Driver support was so dicey. If you had anything even remotely not mainstream, you would be compiling your own video driver, or network driver, or basically left to figure it out for any other peripheral. So many devices like scanners and very early webcams just claimed zero Linux support at all, but you could at times find someone else’s project that might work.

I tried to switch to Linux as a desktop system several times in the late 90s but kept going back to windows because hardware support just wasn’t there yet.

RedWeasel ,

My community college(1997) had a Suse linux computer lab that I learned on. It was mostly used as a networking/server and programming platform.

Loki was the leading porting developer at the time.

The_Zen_Cow_Says_Mu ,

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

Aceticon ,

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.

gnuplusmatt ,

I can’t remember if it was 99 or 2000, I got a copy of Red Hat 6.0 (Hedwig) on the cover of a magazine and installed it. I remember the Lilo boot manager giving me trouble and then it was multiple days of dialing up the internet on my dad’s PC to find info on getting X11 to run correctly on my graphics hardware. Once I got that going it was my win modem that defeated me in the end, couldn’t get any internet. So was back to Windows for another couple of years.

In 2003 my university course had a Linux Administration subject and the lecturer had built a live cd of Fedora Core 2 (this was in the days before live cds were a regular thing) it was a revelation and it worked with much less setup. We had a Linux lab, but the livecd allowed us to work on Linux on our personal machines. I’d dabble with Linux and explore distros for a few years, depending on hard ware compatibility, I’d always have at least one Linux box. I remember attempting to get HalfLife 2 running in Cedega (a commercial fork of wine), even played the original left4dead with friends, this was in 2008. I was there when pulse audio launched before it was ready and when KDE moved to version 4 and was an absolute resource hog. I bought the unreal and tournament games on disc to play on Linux. Was Disappointed when the UT3 release got delayed and then eventually canceled. I remember going to the id software ftps to get the Linux binaries for all the quakes. There were a few other Linux adventures in there, like a misguided attempt at compiling Gentoo in 2007 and working out mythtv server as a media pc and pvr.

Was excited when I got beta access to steam in 2012, and I haven’t had Windows on my personal computers since then.

scottywh ,

I installed and tinkered with Red Hat 5.2 from CD around 97 or 98.

vfreire85 ,

the first contact i had with linux back in mid-90’s brazil was with my isp’s login terminal, which displayed some arcane text reading “red hat linux version x.x”. after that, during my father’s final years working in bank of brazil he had to deal with cobra’s homemade distro in his workstations (cobra had developed an unix in the 80s that run on m68k’s, so no surprises here). it was an absolutely esoteric system to those who only knew the dos/windows 3.11 duo, since w95 only arrived in our country in numbers only in 96. the thing really caught on during the early to mid-2000’s, with faster and cheaper adsl connections, and with them, abundant knowledge and downloads available to any script kid.

lfromanini ,
@lfromanini@feddit.nl avatar

I remember using Conectiva Linux in Brazil. Also tried Kurumin Linux, both Brazilian distros. The biggest pain I recall from these years was to make a modem work and I ended up buying an expensive US Robotics, which worked like a charm.

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