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62 lines
5.2 KiB
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62 lines
5.2 KiB
Markdown
[#]: collector: (lujun9972)
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[#]: translator: (alim0x)
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[#]: reviewer: ( )
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[#]: publisher: ( )
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[#]: url: ( )
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[#]: subject: (My Linux story: Learning Linux in the 90s)
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[#]: via: (https://opensource.com/article/19/11/learning-linux-90s)
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[#]: author: (Mike Harris https://opensource.com/users/mharris)
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My Linux story: Learning Linux in the 90s
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======
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This is the story of how I learned Linux before the age of WiFi, when
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distributions came in the form of a CD.
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![Sky with clouds and grass][1]
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Most people probably don't remember where they, the computing industry, or the everyday world were in 1996. But I remember that year very clearly. I was a sophomore in high school in the middle of Kansas, and it was the start of my journey into free and open source software (FOSS).
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I'm getting ahead of myself here. I was interested in computers even before 1996. I was born and raised on my family's first Apple ][e, followed many years later by the IBM Personal System/2. (Yes, there were definitely some generational skips along the way.) The IBM PS/2 had a very exciting feature: a 1200 baud Hayes modem.
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I don't remember how, but early on, I got the phone number of a local [BBS][2]. Once I dialed into it, I could get a list of other BBSes in the local area, and my adventure into networked computing began.
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In 1995, the people [lucky enough][3] to have a home internet connection spent less than 30 minutes a month using it. That internet was nothing like our modern services that operate over satellite, fiber, CATV coax, or any version of copper lines. Most homes dialed in with a modem, which tied up their phone line. (This was also long before cellphones were pervasive, and most people had just one home phone line.) I don't think there were many independent internet service providers (ISPs) back then, although that may have depended upon where you were located, so most people got service from a handful of big names, including America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy.
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And the service you did get was very slow; even at dial-up's peak evolution at 56K, you could only expect to get a maximum of about 3.5 Kbps. If you wanted to try Linux, downloading a 200MB to 800MB ISO image or (more realistically) a disk image set was a dedication to time, determination, and lack of phone usage.
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I went with the easier route: In 1996, I ordered a "tri-Linux" CD set from a major Linux distributor. These tri-Linux disks provided three distributions; mine included Debian 1.1 (the first stable release of Debian), Red Hat Linux 3.0.3, and Slackware 3.1 (nicknamed Slackware '96). As I recall, the discs were purchased from an online store called [Linux Systems Labs][4]. The online store doesn't exist now, but in the 90s and early 00s, such distributors were common. And so were multi-disc sets of Linux. This one's from 1998 but gives you an idea of what they involved:
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![A tri-linux CD set][5]
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![A tri-linux CD set][6]
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On a fateful day in the summer of 1996, while living in a new and relatively rural city in Kansas, I made my first attempt at installing and working with Linux. Throughout the summer of '96, I tried all three distributions on that tri-Linux CD set. They all ran beautifully on my mom's older Pentium 75MHz computer.
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I ended up choosing [Slackware][7] 3.1 as my preferred distribution, probably more because of the terminal's appearance than the other, more important reasons one should consider before deciding on a distribution.
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I was up and running. I was connecting to an "off-brand" ISP (a local provider in the area), dialing in on my family's second phone line (ordered to accommodate all my internet use). I was in heaven. I had a dual-boot (Microsoft Windows 95 and Slackware 3.1) computer that worked wonderfully. I was still dialing into the BBSes that I knew and loved and playing online BBS games like Trade Wars, Usurper, and Legend of the Red Dragon.
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I can remember spending days upon days of time in #Linux on EFNet (IRC), helping other users answer their Linux questions and interacting with the moderation crew.
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More than 20 years after taking my first swing at using the Linux OS at home, I am now entering my fifth year as a consultant for Red Hat, still using Linux (now Fedora) as my daily driver, and still on IRC helping people looking to use Linux.
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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via: https://opensource.com/article/19/11/learning-linux-90s
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作者：[Mike Harris][a]
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选题：[lujun9972][b]
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译者：[译者ID](https://github.com/译者ID)
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校对：[校对者ID](https://github.com/校对者ID)
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本文由 [LCTT](https://github.com/LCTT/TranslateProject) 原创编译，[Linux中国](https://linux.cn/) 荣誉推出
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[a]: https://opensource.com/users/mharris
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[b]: https://github.com/lujun9972
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[1]: https://opensource.com/sites/default/files/styles/image-full-size/public/lead-images/bus-cloud.png?itok=vz0PIDDS (Sky with clouds and grass)
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[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system
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[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage#Internet_users
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[4]: https://web.archive.org/web/19961221003003/http://lsl.com/
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[5]: https://opensource.com/sites/default/files/20191026_142009.jpg (A tri-linux CD set)
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[6]: https://opensource.com/sites/default/files/20191026_142020.jpg (A tri-linux CD set)
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[7]: http://slackware.com
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