LWN: Comments on "The early days of Linux"

Wonderful, thank you for this article Mr. Lars!

Roniux — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 19:29:31 +0000

I had always been wondering how Linux started, this was a great insight!

What a great read!

yatt-code — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 15:13:01 +0000

Thanks Lars, thats a great story and we love Linux for sure.

HN discussion

pabs — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 04:45:04 +0000

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43225686

The early days of Linux

louisdaoren — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 03:35:09 +0000

great! thanks to linus and you.

The early days of Linux

n7ekg — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 20:15:35 +0000

And a hobby project that attracted a very talented group of individuals from around the world to create something that has changed the face of computing.

The early days of Linux

n7ekg — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 20:15:31 +0000

I got involved when I was working for Sun in late 1991. I had acquired a Sun 2, and was using it to pull news and email from a local university. When they switched UUCP protocols, I had to find another distro, as an upgrade to the latest Sun release was way outside my budget.

I tried 386/BSD, but I wasn't happy with having to wait 6 months for releases, so when I saw Linus' famous "free OS" email in late 1991 (October, as I recall), I jumped on board. Haven't looked back since - I've even been thinking about reviving my UUCP-over-SSH stuff. :)

I ported a lot of software, even ported my own version of curses that I had written years before for MS-DOS, but ncurses won the day. It's been a fun ride, seeing all these distributions, the freedom of choice, the different windowing managers, and lots and lots of apps! From one of my first Linux boxes running 0.99+ on a 486DX4-100 with 16 MB of RAM (the motherboard was sitting on top of a pizza box), to today's monster servers and laptops, it's been an awfully fun journey!

Thanks to Lars, Ted, Remy, Peter, Ian, Linus, and all the rest whose names I can't recall at the moment!

The early days of Linux

n7ekg — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 19:04:21 +0000

And it was flexible enough so that it could be modified to create your own distro, at a time when a Linux distro could be created on a few floppies. Fun times!

I did a distro that was elm/uucp-centric, but lost all of my old software and archives in Hurricane Ivan. :(

The early days of Linux

nix — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 20:27:22 +0000

That story about bending an 8088 to your, er, will is probably the single most terrifying hardware-hacking story not involving high voltage I have ever heard. I'm astonished that it worked at all, but knowing how the 8088's bus-arbitration works it probably did work, simply because the 8087 looked so very much like another 8088 to the 8088 that it was probably happy to coexist with an *actual* 8088 that wasn't trying to do floating point anything. (After all, the 8087 and 8088 more or less had duplicate instruction decoders, etc.)

(... I'm also jealous that you could afford to risk a whole 8088 like that :) )

Semicolons

sammythesnake — Mon, 15 May 2023 05:44:22 +0000

When I was at uni in the late '90s, we had a course "Programming for Physicists" that used Standard Pascal. I was already familiar with a handful of other languages (including TurboPascal™) and finding out that there was such a thing as a "high level" language with no concept of "strings" was mind blowing (and not in a good way)!

Thankfully, I understand that my cohort was the last year before they switched to using that new fangled "Java" thing, which despite valid criticisms was at least a great language for learning how to "do OOP right".

Standard Pascal is not, IMNSHO a "great language" for really anything other than being less brain damaging than my later experience having to use that prehistoric dinosaur FORTRAN - and because it was in the context of stick-in-the-mud physicists at a university, it was a pretty early flavour, too (which at least *had strings* as of FORTRAN77 in '78, 2 decades before that Pascal course!)

I'm mostly Ok now, though. *twitch*

The early days of Linux

jwr — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 13:45:42 +0000

It's amazing how after all these years I still remember Lars's E-mail address — from USENET and the mailing list, I guess. It seems to be burned into my brain :-)

Thank you Lars for this nice writeup, it brings back memories of installing Slackware 1.0 in 1993.

The early days of Linux

madscientist — Sun, 23 Apr 2023 14:55:20 +0000

That anecdote about Linux fubaring his master boot sector hits very close to home: back in 1993 I had a SunOS system at work and I would create floppies to take home to install Linux on my personal 486. One day I got distracted and run dd to /dev/sd0 instead of /dev/fd0 and that was the end of that installation: time to reinstall SunOS from scratch and it took a day or two.

I'm not sure I ever fessed up to my bosses exactly how my system got corrupted :).

Semicolons

fest3er — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 07:58:00 +0000

Not Algol? :)

Semicolons

mathstuf — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 01:02:52 +0000

Fortran certainly is interesting these days. Many modifiers are available to fine tune exactly what you mean (instead of C's "eh, something sane or UB" coin flip). Of course, discovering the modifiers is troublesome at times and with umpteen ways to spell things, the "best" way feels more like C++ subsetting arguments if one cared enough to argue about it.

The early days of Linux

iustin — Sun, 16 Apr 2023 17:27:45 +0000

I saved this article to read on a lazy Sunday afternoon, and indeed what a well written story. I got involved much later (being from a place where computers were rare and terribly expensive that early), and I remember fighting with Slackware <some version> and a Linux 1.2 kernel and X until, much later, I started understanding that my Trident card was not actually supported beyond VGA mode at that time. If I concentrate, I probably could remember the card number, that's how much I was fighting with all these new and wonderful things.

And yes, the Linux Documentation Project was awesome. Like another commenter, I also built small ISPs based on nothing more than one or two Linux machines, lots of serial port expanders, and reading many, many man pages.

Thank you for the trip down the memory lane, much appreciated!

The early days of Linux

ermo — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 14:21:46 +0000

Dear Mr. Wirzenius,

Thank you for the wonderful article and thank you for the time and effort you (and your peers of the same persuasion) put into Linux and its documentation over the years.

It is primarily thanks to said efforts that yours truly got hooked on Linux and never looked back.

The early days of Linux

Ndjenks — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 21:02:49 +0000

You are right.

The early days of Linux

PhilippReisner — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 14:45:55 +0000

Lars, thanks for this article! Your name, Lars Wirzenius, was ringing a bell. I did not know about your role in the early days of Linux. Then I realized that I knew your name from the Linux Documentation Project. I hope that you still meet Linus from time to time.

The early days of Linux

NightMonkey — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 13:55:55 +0000

Please don't tell Linus that Prince of Persia apparently runs well on Wine: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applica..., lest Linux development get horribly delayed.

The early days of Linux

kena — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 10:34:40 +0000

Just gonna point out that Maddog helped arrange the Alpha, which he felt would be a huge boon both for Linux (cross architecture!) and DEC (running Linux!). This, after having Linus come speak at DEC in the US.

The early days of Linux

wtarreau — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 06:24:34 +0000

Awesome article that brings back lots of memories from that era. I discovered Linux in 1994 with SLS and kernel 1.0.4 or 1.0.5 and by then it looked like like a hack, I remember that it was enough to let "ping" run for a few tens of seconds to completely lose network connectivity on that NE2000 card. But everything was fun in it. When you booted from floppies to that white-on-black "login:" prompt, you really felt that the computer was waiting for you to be creative today.

Your story about multi-tasking with "A" and "B" is excellent. I did something comparable when trying to turn an XT motherboard to SMP. I noticed the 8087 and 8088 almost had the same pinout, and using a pair of 74LSxx chips solder on top of it with the 8088 pins bent, I managed to run a second 8088 inserted into the 8087 socket. I had to invert its A19 pin so that it could boot to a RAM address that I could control (just below 512kB) before I released the RST pin. I had zero experience with SMP by then and figured nothing in my MS-DOS was designed to support this. I remember thinking "if at least it could format floppies in the background" (yes by then that was a common and extremely boring task). So I managed to make this second CPU blink the floppy drive's LED by writing to 3F2 IIRC, and could confirm that it continued to do so while I was starting a graphics game on the main CPU. Then I tried other stuff such as switching the CGA text attributes in the frame buffer to change colors on screen. That was totally useless but it felt absolutely awesome to me to imagine that this second CPU with 8 ot 10 pins bent and soldered to mollested 74LSxx was actually working fine there and sharing bus access with the primary CPU. So I can definitely understand the joy you and Linus experienced when seeing this A/B on screen!

Semicolons

rsidd — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 04:27:51 +0000

My first language was BASIC, on a TRS-80 and a BBC Micro. Then came Pascal (Turbo Pascal on MS-DOS). I learned C in grad school in a physics department. I successfully avoided learning Fortran ever. But I'm told Fortran 2003 onwards is not so bad.

Semicolons

Cyberax — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 01:54:15 +0000

> The first high-level language I learned was actually Pascal

Since we're quoting Linus today: "Yeah, yeah, most _practical_ versions of Pascal ended up having all the stuff necessary to break structure, but as you may be able to tell, I was one of the unwashed masses who had to write in "standard Pascal" in my youth. I'm scarred for life"

The early days of Linux

jschrod — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 23:29:17 +0000

Don't tell anybody -- but, it's still there, and actually quite usable nowadays.

The flamers and AOL me-toos have gone, to Facebook, Twitter and other venues.
Currently it's similar to the late 80s, and I like that. ;-)

The early days of Linux

klossner — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 20:20:31 +0000

It was a replacement for the then-ubiquitous "readnews" program, whose name took far too long to type.

The early days of Linux

karim — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 17:10:55 +0000

Wow. Simply one of the best pieces I've read about Linux in a few years. No jokes. Thanks for taking the time to share this.

The early days of Linux

anton — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 16:30:58 +0000

Just resubscribe to comp.arch. Terje Mathisen is still active, although Andy Glew isn't.

The early days of Linux

Klaasjan — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 14:44:17 +0000

I see what you did there ;)

Semicolons

Wol — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 14:42:02 +0000

:-)

FORTRAN - and I can tell it's warped my mind :-)

Cheers,
Wol

The early days of Linux

Tet — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 14:00:34 +0000

Great article, but one minor correction - the first Linux distribution was MCC Interim Linux. SLS didn't arrive until slightly later. I'd been using HJ Lu's boot/root disks, but switched to MCC when it was released.

Semicolons

corbet — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 13:31:11 +0000

The first high-level language I learned was actually Pascal, which was the future according to my university's CS department. I suspect that warped my mind in a number of ways...

The early days of Linux

rsidd — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 08:39:50 +0000

PS - reading Linus's interview (1992 (his style seems to have changed later (just a little))), I wonder if he was ever interested in Lisp programming (just joking (I think)).

corbet is clearly a C programmer; his love of semicolons indicates that.

The early days of Linux

rsidd — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 08:36:54 +0000

Very nice article. I first encountered Linux in 1994, where some nerds in my grad school had already set up a PC running Linux 1.1.3 (I think) to be the department's mail relay. And within a year or two there were Linux desktops around the theoretical physics group, with X11 and all. I remember the desktop viewport was larger than the screen resolution (640x480 in those days) and you had to pan around with a mouse, but it seemed better than Windows95 on the same machine.

The early days of Linux

pmatilai — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 08:14:09 +0000

Priceless! :D Thank you for sharing!

The early days of Linux

ccezar — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 06:27:00 +0000

Thank you Lars!

The early days of Linux

bof — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 06:25:48 +0000

What a nice piece of history. Thanks Lars!

Still remember creating SLS install disks, downloaded through the University FTP access, getting them to work and then just cloning and compiling for a few years what came up afterwards, who needs distros actually... Incredible that you could do all that back then on a 386 with just iirc 8 MB of RAM, and half a Gig or so of disk.

Never looked back to the previous OSses I ran, because - why?

P.S.: Lars, remember our CeBIT booth backroom hacking on Kannel, early 00s? It was such a joy working with you on that back then!

The early days of Linux

jem — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 06:11:29 +0000

I have always suspected the name of the 'rn' program was carefully chosen to be very similar to the often used 'rm'.

The early days of Linux

bof — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 05:53:21 +0000

I miss alt.religion.kibology, which was the way better talk.bizarre.

I miss Andy Glew and Terje Mathisen penning hyper insightful articles on processor architecture and optimisations, on comp.arch

That's about it...

The early days of Linux

hendry — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 02:09:22 +0000

Pleasure to know you Lars. You inspired me and many others!

The early days of Linux

csigler — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 23:21:41 +0000

Who has two thumbs and still misses Usenet?............

The early days of Linux

leromarinvit — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 22:09:59 +0000

> While this was happening, I was taking a nap, and I recommend this method of installing Linux: napping, while Linus does the hard work.

I'd like to nominate this gem as QOTW. It also reminds me of another recent article here, which quoted Rebecca Giblin saying (about Cory Doctorow) "if he were here, he would say 'please don't do that'". I imagine that might be applicable here as well...

Thank you, Lars, for this wonderfully written piece of history!