December 29, 2017 at 17:34Translation of Debian founder Jan Murdoch's article, “How I Were in Linux”
Hello! On December 28, 2015, under rather strange circumstances, Ian Murdock, the founder of the Debian project, passed away. Once wandering around the Web and figuring out the causes of this very mysterious death, I stumbled upon Ian's blog and a post in it entitled “How I came to find Linux”. This text seemed very touching and interesting to me. Since I am not a programmer or an artist, I decided to make my small contribution to the community by translating its text into Russian. I tried to make my translation as close as possible to the text, and, nevertheless, literary, readable. It turned out or not — not for me to judge. The text itself, it seems to me, despite its small size and simplicity, is very important. It is important for understanding that time, that pink era, the fruits of which we still use, whether it be the iPhone, Android or the VK site. com (powered by Debian as far as I know). At the end of the introduction, I would like to give practical meaning to my post. The fact is that I could not find a service for joint translation, which would be simple and clear in the main thing: the placement of the English original and convenient collaboration on the translation, ideally, taking into account different options. Here I looked from the heels and did not find the right one. So I translated it into google docs broken down into line paragraphs and two columns: the original / translation. If you know this: write in the comments and, yes, do not judge strictly. Enjoy reading! in the placement of the English original and convenient collaboration on the translation, ideally taking into account different options. Here I looked from the heels and did not find the right one. So I translated it into google docs broken down into line paragraphs and two columns: the original / translation. If you know this: write in the comments and, yes, do not judge strictly. Enjoy reading! in the placement of the English original and convenient collaboration on the translation, ideally taking into account different options. Here I looked from the heels and did not find the right one. So I translated it into google docs broken down into line paragraphs and two columns: the original / translation. If you know this: write in the comments and, yes, do not judge strictly. Enjoy reading!
I saw my first Sun workstation in the winter of 1992, as a young student at Purdu University. While I was still a student at the Krannerstvo School of Management and my childhood love of computers was reawakened by a compulsory programming course that I studied during the fall semester (we were given the choice of COBOL and FORTRAN languages, both of them seem very outdated even in 1992 - I chose COBOL, because it seemed more “working” of these two languages).
Ten years or more ago, my father, a professor of entomology in Purdu, changed his typewriter to Apple II + at work. Believing that his nine-year-old son could benefit from this, he brought the computer home one weekend with a Space Invaders-style game he had previously bought at a local ComputerLand store. I spent many hours at the computer that weekend. After that I began to accompany my father to the laboratory whenever possible in order to spend as much time as possible on the computer.
As a nine-year-old, I was predictably passionate about games at the beginning and this interest in games led me to my first meeting with programming: computer magazines published code samples of very simple games, which I in turn carefully drove into Apple, hoping, after hours of hard work, that I didn’t make a single mistake (Apple II, at least out of the box, offered a primitive line-by-line editor so that returning and making changes was very tedious, not to mention the luxury of finding errors).
Shortly afterwards, I met Lee Sadlow, strolling through the lab on weekends. Lee was one of dad's graduates who started using Apple to help his experiments. Lee was always happy to explain to me what he was doing when I hung over his shoulder watching; his kindness was undoubtedly justified, at least in part, by the fact that the nine-year-old jerk who watched his every move was the offspring of the dean of his faculty. Without thinking about it, I looked with admiration at how he wrote code in Apple - a code that he invented himself, and not copied from a computer magazine.
Between learning through learning source code from computer magazines and random “lessons” from Lee, I soon started writing games and other simple programs, first in Applesoft BASIC and later in assembly language 6502. To encourage my growing interest, my father ultimately I bought an Apple IIe home and my passion for the computer continued for several more years. However, when I was a teenager, the computer was gradually superseded by more urgent things: such as baseball, music, and girls, and by the mid-1980s, Apple began to collect dust in my chest of drawers, along with a collection of Hardy Boys novels and Star Wars figures.
My passion for computers was in hibernation for the next half dozen years until I was accidentally woken up during a COBOL language course in the fall of 1992. When the course ended, I naturally lost my account on the IBM 3090 mainframe, on which we executed our assignments and laboratory work. Fortunately, as a student, I was attached to a personal account on one of the machines of the university computer center, either to IBM, or to one of the three Sequent Symmetry minicomputers running DYNIX - a variant of the UNIX operating system. A friend convinced me that UNIX was more interesting and had a brighter future than IBM's VM / CMS, and following his advice, I applied for access to one of the Sequent machines. The next week I was the proud owner of an account on sage.cc, complete with a royal generous disk space of 500 kb. (Yes, this is sarcasm, since 500 kb was a scanty amount even for 1992. By the way, over time, I found ways to get around this).
That winter, I had a wolfish appetite for UNIX. I spent most of the evenings in the basement of the mathematical building, basking in the rays of the green phosphorescent radiance of the Z-29 terminals, exploring every corner on the floors of the UNIX system. It was intimidatingly quiet in those terminal rooms where the only sound was the clap-clap-clap of several dozen keyboards and a random whisper like: “Hey, look at that ..”. Often, after an evening of discoveries, I would leave the building along a long path, walking past a glass wall behind which the computer center was holding its cars, looking with awe at the Sequent Symmetry the size of a refrigerator, which I had just been working on, looking at the blinking lights and realizing that hundreds of people are still inside, if only virtually, thanks to the magic of sharing, which technologically advanced computers used to share their computing power among many users, creating the illusion that each one is unique. But most of all, I looked enviously at the system administrators, who were so cool as to have the right to sit on the other side of the glass, endowed with the omnipotent power of the “superuser” in the system console.
Unhappy with the Z-29, I started scouring the campus with the onset of darkness with my friend Jason Balicki and the idea of finding something else. Jason had been a member of a computer science program for several years, so he knew where to look (although it also could not have done without our contribution to science - it was partly fun - to enter buildings at night and pull the door handles of rooms that computers might have on : But are they not open?
The best labs, as I found out, were in an engineering office building (called a bad ENAD abbreviation on campus) in which several rooms with X terminals offered black and white graphical interfaces to Sequent and other UNIX machines scattered around the campus. Soon, my chosen “hacking point" (the term that Jason introduced to me) ended up in one of the laboratories with X terminals, which were essentially intended only for engineering students - a ban that was not supported by passwords, and therefore was modestly ignored.
But the gold core of the ENAD enclosure should have been sought in its laboratories with Sun workstations. Unlike the modest Z-29s and even relatively advanced X-terminals, Sun computers were an example of art with their brilliant cases and high-resolution color displays. Moreover, Jason explained that they worked on the best UNIX of the time, on SunOS, though the “Sans” were much stronger “locked up” than the X-terminals, requiring a local LAN account to access them, so I there was no chance of actually touching SunOS any later.
I also had access to UNIX through my home Intel 286th PC and 2400-baud modem, which saved me from traveling across the campus to a computer lab, especially on cold days. It was cool to be able to get to Sequent from home, but I didn’t want to lose my experience working on the X-terminals of the ENAD case, so one day in January 1993 I went looking for an X-server that would work on my PC. Since I was looking for a similar thing in Usenet, I came across something called “Linux”.
Linux was not an X server of course, but it was something much better: a completely UNIX-like operating system for PC; the fact that I could not imagine that it existed. Unfortunately, he required a 386 processor or higher, and my PC was then the 286th. So I began to put aside my pennies on a machine powerful enough to work on it, and at the same time, while I was doing it, I absorbed everything I could get on the subject of my dreams. A few weeks later, I sent a message to the Purdan computer group on the Usenet network asking if there was anyone on the campus who runs Linux - and I received one response from an IT student named Mike Dickey, who happily invited me to show yourself your Linux installation. Dumbfounded I bought a box of 30 floppy disks and started the slow process of downloading Linux to them from the computer lab of the Krannert building, but it would take another month for me to buy the necessary computer to install it. In the end, I could no longer wait any longer, so Jason and I found an unlocked lab in one of the hostels with one single computer and entered there late in the evening of February to install Linux on this laboratory PC. I’m still wondering from time to time: what was that unhappy student who first came there the next morning to think? so Jason and I found an unlocked lab in one of the hostels with one single computer, and in late February evening we got in there to install Linux on this lab PC. I’m still wondering from time to time: what was that unhappy student who first came there the next morning to think? so Jason and I found an unlocked lab in one of the hostels with one single computer, and in late February evening we got in there to install Linux on this lab PC. I’m still wondering from time to time: what was that unhappy student who first came there the next morning to think?
Linux was created a year and a half before by Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki. Long-time computer enthusiast Torvalds has gone a way, let's say, similar to mine, but he began his programming career with the Commodore Vic-20 and did not spoil it with the more traditional teenagers' hobbies, popular in the 80s. The first acquaintance of Torvalds with UNIX occurred in 1990 during his course at the university and, like mine, it was love at first sight.
In the fall of that year, Torvalds began attending courses on operating systems, which used the textbook “Operating Systems: Development and Implementation” by Andrew Tanenbaum, a professor of computer science at the University of Amsterdam Vrae. Tanenbaum’s book taught operating systems using an example of a UNIX clone for a PC called MINIX, which he wrote, and also included full source code — that is, MINIX’s readable and editable source code on a set of floppy disks so that readers could actually Install, use, and modify this operating system. Intrigued, Torvalds bought a PC in early 1991 and joined the growing MINIX community - the tens of thousands of participants gathered together by the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix news conference. He began to experiment not only with MINIX, but also with the new multitasking capabilities of the Intel 80386 processor, which stood on its PC. (Multitasking makes it easy to run one or more programs on a processor at the same time, which is one of the conditions for sharing systems like Sequent Symmetry, which I was to meet in Purdue next year.) By the summer of 1991, Torvalds experiments with multitasking began to evolve into a full-fledged kernel of the operating system - the main software part of the operating system, which is the intermediary between the CPU, memory, disks and other devices in the computer and provides a simplified interface to these basics advanced computing functions, making it much easier to write complex applications. (Multitasking makes it easy to run one or more programs on a processor at the same time, which is one of the conditions for sharing systems like Sequent Symmetry, which I was to meet in Purdue next year.) By the summer of 1991, Torvalds experiments with multitasking began to evolve into a full-fledged kernel of the operating system - the main software part of the operating system, which is the intermediary between the CPU, memory, disks and other devices in the computer and provides a simplified interface to these basics advanced computing functions, making it much easier to write complex applications. (Multitasking makes it easy to run one or more programs on a processor at the same time, which is one of the conditions for sharing systems like Sequent Symmetry, which I was to meet in Purdue next year.) By the summer of 1991, Torvalds experiments with multitasking began to evolve into a full-fledged kernel of the operating system - the main software part of the operating system, which is the intermediary between the CPU, memory, disks and other devices in the computer and provides a simplified interface to these basics advanced computing functions, making it much easier to write complex applications.
MINIX was not only a friendly operating system for amateur programmers, a project that existed in 1991, but it was one of the few ready-to-use and almost the only one that could work on inexpensive PCs. The most famous operating system project so far has been GNU, led by Richard Stallman. Stallman, who has been programming since the mid-1960s, as a system programmer at MIT (Massachusetts University of Technology) from 1971 to 1983, was an old-school hacker, one of those who work on computers on their own initiative and in some cases zealously (including the Stallman case) believe that all information should be freely distributed.
The goal of the GNU project was to create a free operating system (free not only for price, but also free in the sense of freely modifiable) that would be compatible with UNIX (GNU was the so-called inverse acronym meaning “Gnu's Not Unix”, “so-called” due to the fact that he used a powerful feature often used by recursive programmers, which includes a calculation that uses itself as one of its input.Stallman launched the GNU project in 1983 as a response to the growing market for proprietary software, with that - in which the source code can not be changed, but more often they are not available.
Proprietary programs became an overtly new trend in the early 1980s and very troubling Stallman. Until then, programs were widely and freely distributed along with hardware and hackers often shared copies of their source code, along with their own changes and improvements. Stallman saw the growing trend toward proprietary software as no less than the first step toward the 1984 digital utopia, in which computer users, and ultimately the whole society, would be seized by greedy corporate interests and set out to stop it.
By mid-1991, Stallman and a scattered group of volunteers had assembled most of the GNU operating system — a compiler, debugger, editor, shell (or shell otherwise), many utilities and software libraries that were like UNIX, only better — GNU versions were universally considered to be better their namesake. The only thing that was missing was the core, and soon a small team was created in the Stolmanovsky Foundation for Free Software (a nonprofit organization that he created in 1985 to oversee the development of GNU and protect free software) in order to write this last element. Programmers around the world believed that it would be just a matter of time — the completion and accessibility of GNU, and that they would finally get an operating system free of corporate burdens.
In the other half of the world, Torvalds' own kernel of the operating system became ready enough to release it into the world. In a current post at Usenet comp.os.minix on August 25th, 1991, he wrote:
“Hello to everyone who uses minix. I make an (free) operating system (just as a hobby, it won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386 (486) AT-compatible ones. It has already been cooked since April and is about to be ready. I would like some feedback on what people like and dislike in minix, because my OS is similar to it in some way (the same physical location of the file system (for practical reasons) among other things). ”
The answer was immediate and stunning. While everyone expected GNU to be done soon, it was not ready yet, at least in the form in which it could be used without UNIX backups. And while MINIX was popular, it was not free, although it was certainly inexpensive compared to other UNIX's. Perhaps more important, however, MINIX was seen mainly as a workbook, not software for production, since Tanenbaum did not like to include many patches and changes in its operating system that would expand its capabilities which flowed daily from a crowd of enthusiasts users around the world, fearing that their add-ons would make MINIX too complex and therefore more difficult for students to learn.
The bait from a UNIX-like PC operating system, no matter how imperfect it was, which was free and could evolve at a speed that the community itself wished for, was too good for many MINIX users to resist it, so they began to flock in crowds to the new Torvalds OS, which in the fall of 1991, it seems, has already turned into "Linux". However, Linux was just the kernel - it required a lot of tools and applications installed on top to make it really do something useful. Fortunately, most of them already existed thanks to the GNU Stallman project.
By 1992, several fearless users had begun compiling floppy disk image sets that combined Linux with a number of GNU tools to make it easier for new users to install and run. These collections (later called “distributions”) were getting better each time, and by the time I finally got my PC in March 1993, the Softlanding Linux System (or SLS) distribution had grown to 30 floppies and included many applications and, yes, almost all of the programs that worked in the X-terminals of the ENAD building.
I never tried to connect a Linux X-server, which at that time was on my computer to Sequent, which, apparently, would also be painfully slow at a speed of 2400 baud - several thousand times slower than modern speeds anyway. Since now I had my own personal UNIX, which could be studied right here, at my own table. And I conducted the study in the literal sense: “break your UNIX.” Once I overcame the excitement of the fact that I was a “superuser” - an indescribable power that I had only seen before behind a glass wall, I began to admire not so much Linux itself as the process by which it was created: hundreds of people coding in their own in the back of the system and using the Internet to update the code, slowly but surely making the system better with every change,
(c) Ian Murdock
Original publication on debian.net
How I came to Linux
I saw my first Sun workstation in the winter of 1992, as a young student at Purdu University. While I was still a student at the Krannerstvo School of Management and my childhood love of computers was reawakened by a compulsory programming course that I studied during the fall semester (we were given the choice of COBOL and FORTRAN languages, both of them seem very outdated even in 1992 - I chose COBOL, because it seemed more “working” of these two languages).
Ten years or more ago, my father, a professor of entomology in Purdu, changed his typewriter to Apple II + at work. Believing that his nine-year-old son could benefit from this, he brought the computer home one weekend with a Space Invaders-style game he had previously bought at a local ComputerLand store. I spent many hours at the computer that weekend. After that I began to accompany my father to the laboratory whenever possible in order to spend as much time as possible on the computer.
As a nine-year-old, I was predictably passionate about games at the beginning and this interest in games led me to my first meeting with programming: computer magazines published code samples of very simple games, which I in turn carefully drove into Apple, hoping, after hours of hard work, that I didn’t make a single mistake (Apple II, at least out of the box, offered a primitive line-by-line editor so that returning and making changes was very tedious, not to mention the luxury of finding errors).
Shortly afterwards, I met Lee Sadlow, strolling through the lab on weekends. Lee was one of dad's graduates who started using Apple to help his experiments. Lee was always happy to explain to me what he was doing when I hung over his shoulder watching; his kindness was undoubtedly justified, at least in part, by the fact that the nine-year-old jerk who watched his every move was the offspring of the dean of his faculty. Without thinking about it, I looked with admiration at how he wrote code in Apple - a code that he invented himself, and not copied from a computer magazine.
Between learning through learning source code from computer magazines and random “lessons” from Lee, I soon started writing games and other simple programs, first in Applesoft BASIC and later in assembly language 6502. To encourage my growing interest, my father ultimately I bought an Apple IIe home and my passion for the computer continued for several more years. However, when I was a teenager, the computer was gradually superseded by more urgent things: such as baseball, music, and girls, and by the mid-1980s, Apple began to collect dust in my chest of drawers, along with a collection of Hardy Boys novels and Star Wars figures.
My passion for computers was in hibernation for the next half dozen years until I was accidentally woken up during a COBOL language course in the fall of 1992. When the course ended, I naturally lost my account on the IBM 3090 mainframe, on which we executed our assignments and laboratory work. Fortunately, as a student, I was attached to a personal account on one of the machines of the university computer center, either to IBM, or to one of the three Sequent Symmetry minicomputers running DYNIX - a variant of the UNIX operating system. A friend convinced me that UNIX was more interesting and had a brighter future than IBM's VM / CMS, and following his advice, I applied for access to one of the Sequent machines. The next week I was the proud owner of an account on sage.cc, complete with a royal generous disk space of 500 kb. (Yes, this is sarcasm, since 500 kb was a scanty amount even for 1992. By the way, over time, I found ways to get around this).
That winter, I had a wolfish appetite for UNIX. I spent most of the evenings in the basement of the mathematical building, basking in the rays of the green phosphorescent radiance of the Z-29 terminals, exploring every corner on the floors of the UNIX system. It was intimidatingly quiet in those terminal rooms where the only sound was the clap-clap-clap of several dozen keyboards and a random whisper like: “Hey, look at that ..”. Often, after an evening of discoveries, I would leave the building along a long path, walking past a glass wall behind which the computer center was holding its cars, looking with awe at the Sequent Symmetry the size of a refrigerator, which I had just been working on, looking at the blinking lights and realizing that hundreds of people are still inside, if only virtually, thanks to the magic of sharing, which technologically advanced computers used to share their computing power among many users, creating the illusion that each one is unique. But most of all, I looked enviously at the system administrators, who were so cool as to have the right to sit on the other side of the glass, endowed with the omnipotent power of the “superuser” in the system console.
Unhappy with the Z-29, I started scouring the campus with the onset of darkness with my friend Jason Balicki and the idea of finding something else. Jason had been a member of a computer science program for several years, so he knew where to look (although it also could not have done without our contribution to science - it was partly fun - to enter buildings at night and pull the door handles of rooms that computers might have on : But are they not open?
The best labs, as I found out, were in an engineering office building (called a bad ENAD abbreviation on campus) in which several rooms with X terminals offered black and white graphical interfaces to Sequent and other UNIX machines scattered around the campus. Soon, my chosen “hacking point" (the term that Jason introduced to me) ended up in one of the laboratories with X terminals, which were essentially intended only for engineering students - a ban that was not supported by passwords, and therefore was modestly ignored.
But the gold core of the ENAD enclosure should have been sought in its laboratories with Sun workstations. Unlike the modest Z-29s and even relatively advanced X-terminals, Sun computers were an example of art with their brilliant cases and high-resolution color displays. Moreover, Jason explained that they worked on the best UNIX of the time, on SunOS, though the “Sans” were much stronger “locked up” than the X-terminals, requiring a local LAN account to access them, so I there was no chance of actually touching SunOS any later.
I also had access to UNIX through my home Intel 286th PC and 2400-baud modem, which saved me from traveling across the campus to a computer lab, especially on cold days. It was cool to be able to get to Sequent from home, but I didn’t want to lose my experience working on the X-terminals of the ENAD case, so one day in January 1993 I went looking for an X-server that would work on my PC. Since I was looking for a similar thing in Usenet, I came across something called “Linux”.
Linux was not an X server of course, but it was something much better: a completely UNIX-like operating system for PC; the fact that I could not imagine that it existed. Unfortunately, he required a 386 processor or higher, and my PC was then the 286th. So I began to put aside my pennies on a machine powerful enough to work on it, and at the same time, while I was doing it, I absorbed everything I could get on the subject of my dreams. A few weeks later, I sent a message to the Purdan computer group on the Usenet network asking if there was anyone on the campus who runs Linux - and I received one response from an IT student named Mike Dickey, who happily invited me to show yourself your Linux installation. Dumbfounded I bought a box of 30 floppy disks and started the slow process of downloading Linux to them from the computer lab of the Krannert building, but it would take another month for me to buy the necessary computer to install it. In the end, I could no longer wait any longer, so Jason and I found an unlocked lab in one of the hostels with one single computer and entered there late in the evening of February to install Linux on this laboratory PC. I’m still wondering from time to time: what was that unhappy student who first came there the next morning to think? so Jason and I found an unlocked lab in one of the hostels with one single computer, and in late February evening we got in there to install Linux on this lab PC. I’m still wondering from time to time: what was that unhappy student who first came there the next morning to think? so Jason and I found an unlocked lab in one of the hostels with one single computer, and in late February evening we got in there to install Linux on this lab PC. I’m still wondering from time to time: what was that unhappy student who first came there the next morning to think?
Linux was created a year and a half before by Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki. Long-time computer enthusiast Torvalds has gone a way, let's say, similar to mine, but he began his programming career with the Commodore Vic-20 and did not spoil it with the more traditional teenagers' hobbies, popular in the 80s. The first acquaintance of Torvalds with UNIX occurred in 1990 during his course at the university and, like mine, it was love at first sight.
In the fall of that year, Torvalds began attending courses on operating systems, which used the textbook “Operating Systems: Development and Implementation” by Andrew Tanenbaum, a professor of computer science at the University of Amsterdam Vrae. Tanenbaum’s book taught operating systems using an example of a UNIX clone for a PC called MINIX, which he wrote, and also included full source code — that is, MINIX’s readable and editable source code on a set of floppy disks so that readers could actually Install, use, and modify this operating system. Intrigued, Torvalds bought a PC in early 1991 and joined the growing MINIX community - the tens of thousands of participants gathered together by the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix news conference. He began to experiment not only with MINIX, but also with the new multitasking capabilities of the Intel 80386 processor, which stood on its PC. (Multitasking makes it easy to run one or more programs on a processor at the same time, which is one of the conditions for sharing systems like Sequent Symmetry, which I was to meet in Purdue next year.) By the summer of 1991, Torvalds experiments with multitasking began to evolve into a full-fledged kernel of the operating system - the main software part of the operating system, which is the intermediary between the CPU, memory, disks and other devices in the computer and provides a simplified interface to these basics advanced computing functions, making it much easier to write complex applications. (Multitasking makes it easy to run one or more programs on a processor at the same time, which is one of the conditions for sharing systems like Sequent Symmetry, which I was to meet in Purdue next year.) By the summer of 1991, Torvalds experiments with multitasking began to evolve into a full-fledged kernel of the operating system - the main software part of the operating system, which is the intermediary between the CPU, memory, disks and other devices in the computer and provides a simplified interface to these basics advanced computing functions, making it much easier to write complex applications. (Multitasking makes it easy to run one or more programs on a processor at the same time, which is one of the conditions for sharing systems like Sequent Symmetry, which I was to meet in Purdue next year.) By the summer of 1991, Torvalds experiments with multitasking began to evolve into a full-fledged kernel of the operating system - the main software part of the operating system, which is the intermediary between the CPU, memory, disks and other devices in the computer and provides a simplified interface to these basics advanced computing functions, making it much easier to write complex applications.
MINIX was not only a friendly operating system for amateur programmers, a project that existed in 1991, but it was one of the few ready-to-use and almost the only one that could work on inexpensive PCs. The most famous operating system project so far has been GNU, led by Richard Stallman. Stallman, who has been programming since the mid-1960s, as a system programmer at MIT (Massachusetts University of Technology) from 1971 to 1983, was an old-school hacker, one of those who work on computers on their own initiative and in some cases zealously (including the Stallman case) believe that all information should be freely distributed.
The goal of the GNU project was to create a free operating system (free not only for price, but also free in the sense of freely modifiable) that would be compatible with UNIX (GNU was the so-called inverse acronym meaning “Gnu's Not Unix”, “so-called” due to the fact that he used a powerful feature often used by recursive programmers, which includes a calculation that uses itself as one of its input.Stallman launched the GNU project in 1983 as a response to the growing market for proprietary software, with that - in which the source code can not be changed, but more often they are not available.
Proprietary programs became an overtly new trend in the early 1980s and very troubling Stallman. Until then, programs were widely and freely distributed along with hardware and hackers often shared copies of their source code, along with their own changes and improvements. Stallman saw the growing trend toward proprietary software as no less than the first step toward the 1984 digital utopia, in which computer users, and ultimately the whole society, would be seized by greedy corporate interests and set out to stop it.
By mid-1991, Stallman and a scattered group of volunteers had assembled most of the GNU operating system — a compiler, debugger, editor, shell (or shell otherwise), many utilities and software libraries that were like UNIX, only better — GNU versions were universally considered to be better their namesake. The only thing that was missing was the core, and soon a small team was created in the Stolmanovsky Foundation for Free Software (a nonprofit organization that he created in 1985 to oversee the development of GNU and protect free software) in order to write this last element. Programmers around the world believed that it would be just a matter of time — the completion and accessibility of GNU, and that they would finally get an operating system free of corporate burdens.
In the other half of the world, Torvalds' own kernel of the operating system became ready enough to release it into the world. In a current post at Usenet comp.os.minix on August 25th, 1991, he wrote:
“Hello to everyone who uses minix. I make an (free) operating system (just as a hobby, it won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386 (486) AT-compatible ones. It has already been cooked since April and is about to be ready. I would like some feedback on what people like and dislike in minix, because my OS is similar to it in some way (the same physical location of the file system (for practical reasons) among other things). ”
The answer was immediate and stunning. While everyone expected GNU to be done soon, it was not ready yet, at least in the form in which it could be used without UNIX backups. And while MINIX was popular, it was not free, although it was certainly inexpensive compared to other UNIX's. Perhaps more important, however, MINIX was seen mainly as a workbook, not software for production, since Tanenbaum did not like to include many patches and changes in its operating system that would expand its capabilities which flowed daily from a crowd of enthusiasts users around the world, fearing that their add-ons would make MINIX too complex and therefore more difficult for students to learn.
The bait from a UNIX-like PC operating system, no matter how imperfect it was, which was free and could evolve at a speed that the community itself wished for, was too good for many MINIX users to resist it, so they began to flock in crowds to the new Torvalds OS, which in the fall of 1991, it seems, has already turned into "Linux". However, Linux was just the kernel - it required a lot of tools and applications installed on top to make it really do something useful. Fortunately, most of them already existed thanks to the GNU Stallman project.
By 1992, several fearless users had begun compiling floppy disk image sets that combined Linux with a number of GNU tools to make it easier for new users to install and run. These collections (later called “distributions”) were getting better each time, and by the time I finally got my PC in March 1993, the Softlanding Linux System (or SLS) distribution had grown to 30 floppies and included many applications and, yes, almost all of the programs that worked in the X-terminals of the ENAD building.
I never tried to connect a Linux X-server, which at that time was on my computer to Sequent, which, apparently, would also be painfully slow at a speed of 2400 baud - several thousand times slower than modern speeds anyway. Since now I had my own personal UNIX, which could be studied right here, at my own table. And I conducted the study in the literal sense: “break your UNIX.” Once I overcame the excitement of the fact that I was a “superuser” - an indescribable power that I had only seen before behind a glass wall, I began to admire not so much Linux itself as the process by which it was created: hundreds of people coding in their own in the back of the system and using the Internet to update the code, slowly but surely making the system better with every change,
(c) Ian Murdock
Original publication on debian.net