> cheap. I think that was probably a big part of the initial attraction to
> Linux: a Unix box of your own.
It didn't take much hardware to run a real unix in 1994, even:
http://wps.com/archives/wps.com.11Apr1994/wps-hardware.html
40MHz 386 and 16M RAM. And I ran a business on it. Multiple (2, 3)
users.
As far as I recall, the problems were not technical per se, but
downloading sources and compiling, and the "sysgen" process was
obscure. It actually wasn't that hard, 386/bsd you edited some
junk in a config file and compiled. Default kernel and all that.
No modules. I was a hardcore DOS weenie when I brought that
particular system up, had never gone to a university so had no
contacts there, but I did have two friends who had done this, one
with substantial knowledge, whom I got a lot of hints from
probably.
It was stuff like *this* and not linux that made the early internet
explode. No fault of linux, it simply wasn't around then.
(Ugh, and I had an UNLIMITED BSD/I site license, for which paid
like $100 (seriously), from the "factory", talk about deals of the
century. Around 1995? It got sold with the rest of the assets of
tlg.net. I gave the original BSD/I box away a few years back to a
collector friend. I was storing glue in it (it once was just an
old box :-))
Received on Wed Jan 12 2005 - 19:12:04 GMT