Re: Windows tried to save the world from me

On Thu, 18 Apr 2024 21:29:00 -0400, Joel wrote:

I have a lot of respect for the early adopters of Linux in the '90s and
beyond.

I would UPS you my copy of Red Hat Linux Unleashed but the RH 5.2 CD is
missing unfortunately. You could learn the mysteries of LILO, XF86Config,
CDE, and other wondrous stuff. It was a step up from Slackware on
floppies. Only about a quarter of the 800+ pages are about installing it
and getting it running and building kernels. There are brief overviews of
Apache, DNS, awk, Perl, Python, smtp, ftp, and so forth. By that time 
(1998) Linux was getting somewhat polished but it was sort of the hobbyist
endeavor that DFS seems to remember.

Some of the earliest adopters were amateur radio operators:

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/AX25-HOWTO/

A Linux box, a modem, and a 2M transceiver and you were in tall cotton. I
still have a modem although the serial port might take some work, radios,
and maybe the modem to radio cable but 1200 baud packet radio lost its
bloom a long time ago. For that matter 2M voice traffic on the local
repeaters is rare given that everyone has a cellphone.