For those veteran linux people, what was it like back in 90s? I did see and hear of Unix systems being available for use but I did not see much apart from old versions of Debian in use.

Were they prominent in education like universities? Was it mainly a hobbyist thing at the time compared to the business needs of 98, 95 and classic mac?

I ask this because I found out that some PC games I owned were apparently also on Linux even in CD format from a firm named Loki.

You are viewing a single thread.
View all comments View context
10 points

Is was those crappy winmodems that caused all the problems. They cheaped out on hardware, so you basically got a sound card. All of the work had to be done by the driver, which also put a lot of load on your CPU. Serial modems just worked since everything was done in hardware.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

Ah, right I’d forgotten about those. Of course they weren’t actually modems. So there’s also that.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

I had erased that information from my memory. Also it took a long time for Linux to gain USB support, then a long time to get WIFI (also because of the cheap vendors that used windows drivers to do the heavy lifting). Yeah, it was a very uphill struggle, with Microsoft actively pushing against Linux (remember the ‘Linux is a virus’ narrative?) I’m amazed we made it this far.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Linux

!linux@lemmy.ml

Create post

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word “Linux” in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

  • Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
  • No misinformation
  • No NSFW content
  • No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

Community stats

  • 8.9K

    Monthly active users

  • 5.6K

    Posts

  • 154K

    Comments