this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
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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.
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Everything was harder back then - even when using Windows. But you had to be a real masochist to run Linux.
Computers were still quite new that most people had no real use for them beyond "work things". Only nerds really used them for anything else. "Do you have an email address" isn't a question you ask today.
"Kids these days" don't realize how easy they have it when it comes to just general comparability. There weren't a lot of standards yet and vendors had proprietary drivers and offered no support AT ALL for "lye nux". You had to do a ton of research and fiddling to figure out if there was any support for your specific version of a specific chip used by any peripheral you used. And then to discover that you had to patch your kernel to add a driver that somebody had bodged together. So now you were running your own fun custom-kernel so you could get full-duplex rather than simplex audio! But it works!
Like - lets say today you want to buy an external IDE drive controller to plug in some old drives to for backup. You to to Amazon, search "USB external IDE enclosure" and buy the cheapest one you find. It probably works unless it's defective. In '95 USB and Firewire were in their infancy so you would probably buy a serial or parallel port device. You would need to find whether Linux supported the specific version of the thing you wanted to buy, what tools there would be for it, etc. There was no standard "bulk storage device" driver that you could rely on or hope the vendor would implement. Even if you were an early adopter and got a USB or Firewire device it might have some "basic" functionality that works with OSS drivers but you couldn't use all of it.
Vendors back then also shipped their own software with things, not just drivers. It was always just the absolute worst crap that was buggy as shit. But it would do a lot of the heavy lifting in working with their device. Like any Creative Labs audio player you wanted to get working. Sure it used USB but it didn't just mount as storage device, you needed to use the worst GUI ever put before mankind to use it (under Windows). Under Linux you had to find a specific tool that would support pushing/pulling media from it. These days it would just mount as a drive automatically and you'd use standard desktop tools to interact with it.
Even with DOS/Windows you'd buy a game and as you came home from the store with it in a box wonder "will this work on my computer and how long will I need to mess with it?" I had to configure a specific CD-ROM driver to be used by DOS just to run Tie Fighter vs. X-Wing for example. Had a special boot floppy just for that game since that driver didn't work with literally anything else I had.
Hardware just generally didn't "auto configure". "Plug 'n Play" was still very much in its infancy and you often had to manually configure hardware and install special drivers just for a particular card or peripheral.
IRQ 7 DMA 220. I probably just triggered some folks. If you were setting up a "Sound Blaster or compatible" then you had to know what interrupt it used (7) and what address it was on on the direct-memory bus (220). And you hoped there wasn't a conflict with something else. If there was then there would be a DIP switch you could use to change the base memory address or IRQ from the default. But you were telling your software where to find the card.
USB was a f'ing game changer for peripherals. Serial and parallel ports were so slow and obnoxious to use. Before that there was no real way to "probe" the bus to discover what was there unless you knew exactly what you were looking for (there's no
lsusbfor serial ports). So you just guessed at the driver you need and "modprob foo" hoping it worked.It's amazing what 20ish years of just developing standards has done.
If you want a taste of that world I highly recommend LGR on YouTube. He's mostly Windows focused but look for videos where he tries out "oddware" to see how often he has trouble getting things to work on period hardware using the vendor-supplied software even. Then multiply that by 100x for Linux. :-)
LoL!!! IRQ 5 DMA 220 for me. Had to manually adjust the jumper on the sound card.
Fucking hell...
Port 220.
IRQ 5, port 220h, DMA 1 was what I used for my SoundBlaster 2.
Later I used IRQ 5, port 220h, DMA 1, high DMA 5 for my SoundBlaster 16.
Do you think it's worth getting a Sound Blaster card today? I've read you can get better sound effects in game. Can't the on board audio chips do that now?
I gotta be honest, I haven't used a dedicated sound card since the Vista/7 era when EAX stopped being a thing and onboard sound could handle 5.1 output just fine. The last one I had was a SoundBlaster Audigy.
These days the main uses for dedicated sound interfaces are for when you need something like XLR in/out and then you'll probably go with something USB.
I was reading your wall of text chomping at the bit to complain about IRQs and dip switches but you covered even that!
Oh wait, you didn't include having a math coprocessor daughter boards! I barely remember them but remember my dad building computers with them.
I kinda wish I was a teen when the first computer kits were coming out. And phone phreaking.
I remember buying a bunch of old HP ISA 100Mbit NICs to turn an old computer into a router/server combo. Naive as I was I put them all in and nothing worked. Turns out they were all configured to use the same IRQ (since they likely came from independent machines), and that caused them to overwrite each others settings... including the MAC adress. Thankfully I found some nice hacker that worked with these cards before and published a little C tool to rewrite their EEPROMs. I contacted him if he sees a chance to resurrect the cards and that saint indeed hacked the necessary features into his tool so I could rewrite the MAC adresses, change the IRQ one by one and ended up with a working network. Good times.
I wasn't that into computers at that point in my life, but it was definitely a time where "computers" was a hobby, in the same way that restoring old motorcycles was/is a hobby. Sure, you might take it out for a spin every now and again, but a lot more time is spent tinkering than simply using.
I'm constantly amazed by how much better the end-user experience is today, even just from 10 years ago. The installers are better, the pre-configured software and settings are more thoughtfully chosen, and now we're at the beginnings of meaningful Linux gaming for non-hobbyists.
We truly stand upon the shoulders of giants, and I look forward to the future.
Gaming has been the biggest change in the last 10 years or so. Mostly thanks to Steam. It's easier to game on Linux these days than it is MacOS! It's crazy.
Oh, like scanners still.
Scanners and printers are one area of computing that have always sucked the most relative to other things. They're better these days but they're still the one thing I expect to fail on a regular basis.
This. However from about the release of knoppix and ubuntu things started looking and feeling a lot more like they are today. -- I credit that to Knoppix for X & filesystem work and Ubuntu for setup and everything desktop.
So even though late 90s it was tough, it was nothing like mid 90s. But by around 2004-2005ish the install and setup was substantially easier however the reputational damage still exists to today.
I remember spending a lot of time in XFree86 config files, re-configuring it trying to figure out what works best on my monitor, and then the migration to XOrg. All good times.
There was however a substantial amount of hype around Linux. It wasn't quite what it is with AI. But you couldn't read a magazine without encountering it in some way, but it was the type of hype were everyone knew of it but few people had anything to do with it.
Another thing that hadn't been mentioned is that there was a new distribution cropping up every day or so. (It felt like at least.) But this seems to back up that statement: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg