A very noisy person crawled out of my killfile to post his
"Linux origin story", which can be dated with the following
factoid:
"The first release of Mandrake was based on Red Hat
Linux (version 5.1) and K Desktop Environment 1 in July 1998."
Six years earlier, I had a student-access Linux host running
at the community college where I worked (student worker) and
studied. The system, "Nermal", was developed over 1992 as part
of my "Special Studies in Computer Science" course
which I applied for, and was allowed to take. Our campus was one
of three community colleges in California that had just attached to the
Internet, so this was a way for students to have email and a shell
host -- a big deal in 1992.
Indeed, I found and old Xenix system that had an 8-port serial
card, which would run with Linux's serial drivers with only
slight driver modification. With a small rack of 8 - 2400bps
modems, students could dial in.
Not too much later, I was weary of being a "starving student",
and went to work at the campus full-time in Computing Services.
As the student-access system, "Nermal", got more an more popular, a black
market in student id's cropped up. (Student id's were part of the signup
process.) A good friend reasoned that if non-students were willing to pay
for black market id's, they would probably prefer to pay for a legitimate
service.
He and I did some cost accounting and determined what we would
need to charge, and so forth, for us to get our own leased-line
for Internet connectivity. This included a subscription through
PageSAT for Usenet delivered via satellite. We formed a
partnership, and opened our doors in 1994. Part of our
initial development was selecting the OS for our system...we
tried a few, and ended up back with Linux, which has
scaled well for our needs.
We're still in business, God willing and the creeks don't rise.
Our flagship product now is 10Gbit fiber-to-the-home.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-fastest-isps-of-2022I am privileged to be associated with this amazing group of people,
now numbering over 750 (last time I did a count, it's probably much
more than that now). And on this 30th anniversary of our business,
I made sure to let Dad -- a retired telecom tech from the government
sector -- know that his wisdom is one reason for our success: He
taught me (us) that if something goes wrong, we tell people straight-up
what happened, and what we're doing to prevent it in the future.
We used to keep our status blog (our "MOTD", Message of the Day)
front-and-center on our home page -- and sometimes, it's
been really, really hard to write those MOTD entries. I've
had my fair share of screwups, as well as others.
(I've almost decided to write a book, working title:
_My Life with Linux Screwups_. There's been some doozies...)
Anyway, that's enough of my rambling. What is the arc of
*your* history with Linux?
-- -v System76 Thelio Mega v1.1 x86_64 NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti OS: Linux 6.11.0-rc2 Release: Mint 21.3 Mem: 258G
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