Who was first...
Who was first...
Posted Jul 1, 2004 9:48 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753)Parent article: A Short History of Linux Distributions
Did Yggdrasil really precede SLS? I recall it was otherwise (I have used both), and a bit of googling in comp.os.linux archives confirms it:
In the newsgroup, Yggdrasil's alpha version was announced on 1992-11-24
SLS is mentioned on a 1992-08-12 posting where its author is looking for a friendly FTP admin for hosting the distribution, and also tells how to order floppies.
The Yggdrasil distribution went to heroic lenghts to ensure the CD was accessible. At that time there were lots of incompatible CD rom interfaces in addition to SCSI, which was more expensive. I think the IDE CD interface was not yet standardized in 1992. As a last resort, the later Yggdrasils even included a hack for running any proprietary MS-DOS CD-ROM driver from inside Linux!
Posted Jul 1, 2004 18:21 UTC (Thu)
by tjc (guest, #137)
[Link] (2 responses)
I recall something from the same time period called "Infomagic" (I think), but I'm not sure where this fits in. I threw the discs out a long time ago. I never could get any of these to work with my Diamond video card (Diamond withheld the necessary specs), and it wasn't until Slackware came along that I was able to get X working.
Posted Jul 2, 2004 1:41 UTC (Fri)
by X-Nc (guest, #1661)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 2, 2004 7:59 UTC (Fri)
by eru (subscriber, #2753)
[Link]
I still have an Infomagic source CD from 1993. It's contents is very much like one would find on a public university FTP server in those days: various X11, GNU and BSD sources.
By the way, for everyone with early CD:s like this: don't throw them away. They might became important sources if you ever need to find prior art for software patents. A CD like this is a publication with a known issue date and provenance.
Posted Jul 12, 2004 18:50 UTC (Mon)
by b12arr0 (guest, #22994)
[Link]
Posted Feb 2, 2007 21:03 UTC (Fri)
by bcshum0 (guest, #43114)
[Link]
Contact me at brantley.bighead_at_gmail_dot_com
Did Yggdrasil really precede SLS? I recall it was otherwise [snip]Who was first...
Infomagic was one of the first, if not the first, companies to sell Linux CD's. They packaged up a few CDs worth of files and also some small amount of printed material. Though I can't remember his name, I met the founder of Infomagic at Open Systems/FedUNIX in '93 (or was it '94?). This was maybe a year before he passed away.
Who was first...
That is also what I remember. I don't think Infomagic ever made a distribution of its own, but they published CD:s with other peoples Linux distributions on them.
Infomagic and source CD:s
I remember SLS was before Yggdrasil as well. I remember running SLS and hearing of Yggdrasil being a CD based distro. My only thought was I'm glad I don't run that because then I'd have to pronounce it. :)Who was first...
Russ
I'm looking for the user that goes by the name of ERU. I'm replying to a very old post you made in 2004. You mentioned in your post that you have a Linux CD from 1993, and you also mentioned that people should hang onto such CD's for prior art purposes. I would love to get in touch with you concerning obtaining a copy of your CD for prior art purposes. Or if you happen to know people who have other old linux CDs lying around, I'd love to hear about it. Who was first...