LWN: Comments on "Owen Le Blanc: creator of the first Linux distribution"

Owen also organised and run ManLUG meetings back then

cfillekes — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 16:17:31 +0000

True! I was in Manchester for work for a couple weeks in the early 2000's and went out of my way to attend a ManLUG meeting -- two talks, snacks, great fellowship and a trip to the pub for curry afterwards. Learned about Squid internals and use of Linux thin clients, but most memorable was chatting with Owen over currywurst obvi. IIRC his academic background is philosophy and he was still active, publishing and teaching in it, while organizing ManLUG, keeping those hundreds of desktops in Kilburn hall up to date, and taking time out to talk to a weirdo like me vising from the other side of the world. Not all superheros wear capes.

"ITS"

jake — Sun, 04 May 2025 18:24:26 +0000

> MCC became "Information Technology Services (ITS)", but the link goes to the
> website of a department of a university in the USA with the same name

ouch, indeed it does ... but now it goes here:

https://www.itservices.manchester.ac.uk/

which seems to the right place ...

thanks,

jake

"ITS"

cyberia — Sun, 04 May 2025 17:58:20 +0000

The article mentions that the MCC became "Information Technology Services (ITS)", but the link goes to the website of a department of a university in the USA with the same name. Presumably it's a mistake, but what really became of the MCC at the University of Manchester in Manchester, England?

Actually

boutell — Fri, 02 May 2025 11:52:44 +0000

I remember the humorous version number now: 0.99pl10+. Looks like this was a popular starting point!

Gratitude for MCC Interim Linux

boutell — Fri, 02 May 2025 11:52:37 +0000

It was my first distribution as well. I want to say it was version 0.9. Pretty useful stuff by then. Ran on my beloved 386-40, my first credit card purchase after starting my first professional programming job. I still have the motherboard.

Underused technology in Manchester

Grimthorpe — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 20:23:35 +0000

Having also been at Manchester in the early 90's I do remember friends who owned PCs going to the MCC with a couple of floppy disks to get the latest version. As I had access to the Sun Workstations upstairs and no PC to run Linux I didn't see the point at that time.

But one of my overriding memories of the machine room there was the NeXT cube that was used as the console device for the KSR supercomputer that allegedly could only run for up to 10 minutes before crashing.
The NeXT cube's job for 99% of the time was to just show a colourful KSR logo spinning on the screen to anyone walking past.

OT Linux Universe [WAS Great article!]

Wol — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 18:32:56 +0000

Sounds right - even the authors' names ring a bell :-)

I assumed it was a distro with a manual.

Cheers,
Wol

OT Linux Universe [WAS Great article!]

amacater — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 17:14:24 +0000

Linux Universe is apparently a book with CD from 1995 from Strobel and Uhl as authors - maybe that's what you remember - certainly the cover might lead you to read it as Universe Linux.
1994 was about the time when you could get Slackware 2.0 on one CD or a three or four CD box from Walnut Creek including Linux distributions and the tsx-11 software archive.

Great article!

Wol — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 16:05:24 +0000

Did anybody else come across Universe Linux? I remember buying a book with it (kernel 1.3), but I've never seen it before or since. It was my first linux.

Cheers,
Wol

PARC was there first

wittenberg — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 15:37:41 +0000

Xerox PARC's Alto was introduced in 1973. You can argue about whether it was a "microcomputer", but it was certainly a "personal Computer. It used Ethernet eventually, but I believe it had networking from the start.

Owen also organised and run ManLUG meetings back then

stsimb — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 08:17:14 +0000

Another thing that Owen and his friends (John Heaton, Ted Harding, etc) did back in the 90s was organising and running a monthly meeting for the local Linux User Group (ManLUG).

It attracted people interested in Linux who lived in Manchester (I was a CS student there between '94 and '00) or even other places nearby (we regularly had Richard coming from Sheffield). We were about 20-30 people who attended semi-regularly. The meeting took place in a room inside the Manchester Computing Centre's building, and in order to reach it you had to walk through a corridor with an impressive view to the MCC's supercomputers (a Cray, a Fujitsu vector system and many more), all of which were part of JANET's resources shared amongst British universities.

In the meetings we had various speakers with interesting subjects to cover, and of course Owen & friends were always there to help. Their efforts created a thriving community and a forum for idea exchange among passionate individuals.

Thank you Owen, John, Ted and everybody else who was there at the time!

Financial rather than "industry standard" motivation against open source?

irogers — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 01:53:46 +0000

I'm very happy to have been at Manchester in the 1990s but I was probably little known to Owen. I too saw the push for "industry standard" solutions, in particular in the acquisition of very expensive SGI hardware just to run a website. With hindsight I wonder if the University wasn't motivated for these solutions as they pushed up grant applications, the University receiving a fixed cut of any awarded grant money. Congratulations to LWN for singing the praises of the likes of Owen, the MCC machines running the transparent proxy caching servers I was always immensely impressed by.

A true blast from the past, and a welcome one

rhowe — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 22:39:25 +0000

That is a name I had not heard in a long time! I'm fairly sure I met Owen at an MCC open day when I was working out which universities to apply to.

He was demonstrating an early KDE release, probably more recent than I'd manage to build, on some pentium 2 (maybe 3?) desktops. I think it was probably 1999.

Needless to say, as someone who'd been using Linux for a couple of years at home on a 486 it had me sold and I applied to Manchester soon after.

You probably don't remember it, but I asked you if ftp.mcc.ac.uk was down in 2003 and you restarted the service, bringing it back. Happy, simpler days.

DOS for networking?

Wol — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:03:17 +0000

I remember Pr1mes using Cambridge Ring in the early 80s. According to Wikipedia that originally dates from 1974.

And actually, reading the article, a few things suddenly make sense ... apparently a ring is limited to 255 nodes, and it's coming back to me there was an American ring. I think I was at Pr1me Southampton, and they demo'd it by jumping from ring to ring. I know you usually typed "login username", but you could also type "login username on systemname", and istr some way of putting a gateway in - maybe like "login username on systemname via othersystemname".

Cheers,
Wol

DOS for networking?

butlerm — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 17:16:30 +0000

I believe MS DOS was approximately the first microcomputer operating system known for its networking capabilities - by the mid 1980s DOS machines running NetBios or Netware protocols over Ethernet or Token Ring were ubiquitous in large business offices and on manufacturing shop floors. The early Macs were second - with relatively slow AppleTalk (and then EtherTalk) implementations built in. Workstations like those from Sun and Apollo that came with TCP/IP were relatively rare. The first relatively common PC operating system where that was common was probably OS/2, which did other IBM networking protocols as well, mostly for talking to IBM mainframes and minicomputers over Token Ring or something similar.

VAX VMS machines with DECNet and later TCP/IP were relatively common in some environments as well, although personal computers mostly accessed minicomputers and larger machines using terminal emulators at first, and usually over an RS232 serial port or (relatively slow) modem of some type. Even in Unix machines, UUCP over phone line was much more common than Ethernet for most of the 1980s. And on the Amiga, the Atari ST, and Apple II series, Ethernet interfaces were somewhere between rare and non-existent back then.

On the PC TCP/IP did not become relatively common until Trumpet Winsock was released for Windows 3.1 over DOS in the early 1990s or so, before Windows 95's and Windows NT's built in TCP/IP networking took over the world and supplanted most Layer 2 and Layer 3 ISO networking protocols in the 1995 timeframe. Before that the networking capabilities of most home computers largely consisted of dialing up Bulletin Board Systems using whatever POTS compatible modem was reasonably affordable at the time.

300 baud was common and relatively inexpensive by the early 1980s for that, with 1200 and 2400 bps soon to follow. 9600 baud modems were expensive at first, like cost more than your computer expensive, and often used for Unix and other large servers to do things like exchange email and USENET newsgroup messages over dialup several times a day back when long distance calls were cost prohibitive even for large institutions. Some BBS software usable by ordinary PCs had similar capabilities, and I believe Minitel made waves with X.25 terminals in France around the same time.

Filesystem support

corbet — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 13:08:40 +0000

I don't remember exactly when FAT filesystem support came in. I do remember, though, that GNU mtools was the lowest-friction way of dealing with diskettes and such for a long time.

DOS for networking?

jkingweb — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 11:40:48 +0000

Thanks, that was the insight I was missing. Did early Linux also have DOS filesystem support so you could easily transfer files back and forth locally, or were more gymnastics required?

Great article!

danieldk — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 06:39:15 +0000

Thanks for the great article. I never used MCC interim (started with Slackware in 1994), but it was certainly a name that would pop up every now and then back in the day. Really nice to get this history documented. SLS, Ygdrassil and early Slackware/SUSE/Red Hat next?

Thanks!

pabs — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 23:05:28 +0000

Excellent article suggestion by Roger Whittaker, and a great article. Thanks to LWN and Owen Le Blanc for documenting this portion of FOSS history.

DOS for networking?

hrw — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 20:47:42 +0000

There were so called 'packet drivers' for DOS. Created in late 80s.

Simple API allowed to run bare networking stuff and/or TCP/IP stack.

I used those in 2000-2001 to write my master thesis (target machines were not good enough to run Linux).

DOS for networking?

corbet — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 19:35:41 +0000

Early versions of the kernel lacked advanced features like TCP/IP networking, so you had to use a different system to talk to the world.

My first exposure.

Cardinal_Bill — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 19:20:24 +0000

First one I can remember was playing around with someone else's copy of Yggdrasil. It was a live CD version, probably back around 1993. Then I bought my own copy of Mandrake, IIRC, a while later.

DOS for networking?

jkingweb — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 19:13:34 +0000

> You needed Minix because the DOS fdisk program could not write partitions for other operating systems, and you needed DOS if you wanted to do networking.

Why was this so? DOS isn't exactly known for its networking capabilities, so I struggle to see the connection.

thank you

smoogen — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 16:16:38 +0000

Thank you Owen Le Blanc for your work on MCC. It was my first Linux that I installed on a knockoff-i386 system in 1992.

We had been using a LynxOS Realtime Unix before this and having all kinds of problems with lack of working applications. A technician I worked with at the University said "You have got to try this new operating system!" and everything worked. I used it heavily until the connections from Socorro, New Mexico, US to Manchester, UK got too painful with failed FTP and other oddities. However I was hooked and have been using Linux ever since.

So thank you again.
Stephen

I have fond memories of MCC

jepler — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 16:14:32 +0000

While I initially tried installing SLS the first really honestly working Linux distro I installed was MCC. This was '93 or 94, I suppose.

I don't recall the specifics, but installing the system, gcc, and X from just a few floppy disks was amazing, even though once you'd done that there was nothing like a modern packaging system available to use.