Linux and how it started
I bought my first PC around 1996 with one of the first Pentium CPUs and ...
Why am I telling all this? All the above had a lot to do with some unhappiness of myself related to PC operating systems.
A fellow student complained in a lunch conversation about the mismatch of the architecture of state of the art PC CPUs and the predominant operating system Windows 3.11. "How can it possibly be that the hardware has a state of the art architecture (32 bit) and the operating system (Win 3.11, 16 bit) does not support it?" he asked. At the same time, computer vendor Vobis in Germany delivered PCs by default with OS/2 pre-installed. Windows 3.11 was available too but only if the customer explicitly asked for it. Their decision made headlines. With the nagging of my fellow student in mind I bought a PC at Vobis. Influenced by the talk of my fellow student I chose OS/2 ...
OS/2 was nice, really. But I had nothing to install on it. No office software, no video player, no games, nothing! Not that I say there was nothing available on the market but none of my friends used OS/2, so nobody could share any software with me. Most of them even didn't know about OS/2.
I felt like I had stepped into a trap - the guy who complained so heavily about Win 3.11, used it by himself - conveniently of course - and had no issues.
I wondered what I should do and at the same time the new Windows 95 was released. I really longed so much to install it to become part of the crowd again. The only problem was that I didn't have a valid license for it. I installed it with a trial license but didn't feel comfortable with it. An unlicensed operating system caused me a headache. But how to obtain a valid license? Buying one would have been a choice of course and I was lucky to get a subsidised license through a company that I worked for.
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But there was one thing that I didn't like about all this. Why would I have to pay for an operating system as a private user?
At the same time I heard the first rumors about Linux. Some computer magazines also wrote about it and some fellow students struggled (back then it was a struggle) to install it on their PCs. When my parents asked me what I wanted for Christmas I said "SUSE Linux". What I got was a set of 5 CDs plus a nicely printed and wonderfully fragrant book. I started reading the book immediately and got so intrigued by it. Like every Linux distribution, SUSE Linux provided a dual boot capability. This was part of its design. Much later I read "The rebel code" by Glyn Moody. Moody writes, that Linus Torvalds, the inventor of Linux, designed it that way as he needed a Unix operating system on his PC to work. He also needed a Windows to play games. He, so says the book, loved to play "Prince of Persia" and that was only available on Windows. Some people say that Linux only survived because of its dual boot capability!
In order to install it, one had to defrag the hard disk, partition it in the first place and install the boot loader afterwards. Then followed the installation of Linux on the Linux partitions. If all had worked well one had a PC with two operating systems and one could choose during the boot process which one should start.
That was just the beginning. There was no graphical user interface at that point, no PPP connection to an Internet Service Provider, no application was installed. There was still a lot of work ahead of me. Setting up the PPP connection to the Internet Service Provider was not trivial, nor was setting up the GUI. If it worked, there was a 640x480 resolution with a bad frequency and no Windows-like menu or anything. Frankly, I had a Unix operating system on my PC but didn't know what to do with it. Many of the prejudices about Linux have their origins back in the old days when Linux was new and was used only by a small group of people. Linux has evolved but the prejudices are still there.
To be continued ...