Who was using Linux in the '90s? Masochists?

Who was using Linux in the '90s? Masochists?
I can't even imagine the pain it was to use before the Internet.

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youtube.com/watch?v=gqfg8tEVZ9c
ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/sunsite.unc.edu/Nov-06-1994/
youtube.com/watch?v=3bl1ZI-J6hM
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i always wanted to hear histories of people using linux on the very past, how the fuck did you installed shit without internet? what was the trick?

Your friend at MIT, Caltech, Berkley, or Stanford gave you a copy.

I used it, without X.
To dialup to the internet you had to write a shell script.

Like this
youtube.com/watch?v=gqfg8tEVZ9c

That unironically looks better than all the flat shit DEs and WMs we have now.

You generally bought a distro that came on CDs, manuals etc

It was just a kernel.

>started with Slackware around 1995
>CD-ROM or multiple floppy install, didn't take much since I was installing to a 40MB drive
>no GUI until years later

Wasn't that bad, but I've forgotten half the shit you had to do to make things work, like messing with isapnp devices, building kernels with just the drivers you needed, futzing with LILO for hours trying to get the damn thing to boot.
Don't even get me started on X configuration.
>before the Internet
Internet was around then, just slower and harder to find information on.
You could get a lot of stuff from FTP though, like from sunsite:
ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/sunsite.unc.edu/Nov-06-1994/

Just getting X running was often a challenge

There was internet back then

it wasn't bad, hard drives were big enough to store all documentation that came with the system. We also had irc/usenet and the Linux Documentation project on the web. If you wanted tutorials you usually bought an Oreilly book.

Slackware CDs included everything you might ever need. My 56k ISA modem worked flawlessly and I only downloaded mplayer source once, and emesene, because MSN Messenger was king and aMSN was a bloated piece of shit. Oh, also Opera was my default browser since plain Mozilla was incredibly slow.
Didnt have any video drivers issue because had TNT2 like everyone else and it was compatible with everything.
Considering the only option was win98, Slackware felt really modern, unlike Mandrake that looked like a chink copy of windows.
Used that setup from 99 to 2002, when the SP2 for win2k came out and got a 128mb ram upgrade on my K6-2
Overall, it wasn't as bad as many think, simpler times I guess

Only, developers and hackers. If your drivers didn't work (and they probably didn't) then you learned assembly and wrote your own drivers.

Looking at the state of linux nowadays I can't even imagine how shitty it was

what the fuck? how old are you?

25. How old should I be?

>>You will never have a dad help you install linux in 1998

It's fine though
> inb4 gtk filepicker memes

Ironically, it was simpler. Less distros and each had it's unique aproach.
You had .rpm ones that mostly where trying to be Windows clones, Debian that was fine but not really friendly without broadband (you had to get like 9 CDs), and Slackware that had a GOAT installer and was gr8 for learning and getting a pure Linux experience.
I got into it by 99-00 and after experiencing rpm hell went full Slackware, took me a while but it was fun to get stuff working by yourself. KDE 3 was a godsend and but I was using fluxbox + rox-filer since it was lighter and looked more modern than windows at the time. Wish I could find screenshots from my old riced desktop.
You could also watch movies, listen to music and even use IM without X thanks to Lilo and its framebuffer mode.
Also, most installers like where 3-4mb max, even the Opera installer was like 5mb.

It wasn't terrible. Get a slackware disc set every so often, install, and go about your day. Or get a redhat disc set, and use it.

RH 7.3 was absolutely top-tier

>all these early 2000 installs.
It was just as easy to install GNU/Linux as it was win98 by that point in time.

Slackware around 99 or 00. Shit was rough.

In my case, I had a brother in-law that was a sysadmin and he copied CDs for me and gave me a hand when necessary, althou he was more into BSD
btw, before OsX everyone was looking at bsd for a Windows replacement, there was an attempt to even run win programs with a kernel module instead of wine (that was way shittier that today), but it all got scrapped later

Early KDE was best KDE.

Ordered OpenSuse box. Several DVDs (or CDs, don't remember). What laggy as fudge. x11 was really bad. Bad hardware support, lacking in drivers.

KDE 1 in 640x480.

>selecting resolution and driver is hard.
Try installing NeXTSTEP for intel, shit had you dealing with DMA channels and IRQ levels for you monitor.

Thats why we all bought TNT2s, US robotics ISA 56k modems and Soundblaster cards.
They worked like a charm in any distro

I always liked the externals. As long as you had a 16550 serial port controller you were good to go as far as speed. And they were less prone to destroying your mobo when the inevitable lightening strike.

>open mozilla
>vomit

I remember it took me forever to get sound to work. Even longer than setting up X.

universities in north america had local servers connected to the early internet in the mid 80's and was reachable via BBS , the only struggle was the dialup modem setup, if someone in your family wanted to use the phone , your connection was lost until someone invented a banana phone with a botton to activate/deactivate second calls.

Remember LINDOWS

God I loved NeXT. Still run OpenStep sometimes just for old times sake

>Don't even get me started on X configuration.

Ah the joys of changing, failing, changing, failing, then finally getting it to sort of work.

Beautiful and clean it was, a tool to get things done.

It hurts me to see apple bowdlerize OSX with each successive release. For a while it was like OpenStep with beautiful graphics

The people that were using Linux in the 90's were the same people that used UNIX everyday and wanted a free implementation of it. They already knew what they were getting into.

You could order Linux distributions (i.e. SuSE, RedHat or Debian in Book shops. They came with 6-8 CDs with the package repositories and a handbook or two.

first off we had the internet in the 90s and second off all computers where more of as pain to use without the internet if youb wanted a game you had to actually go to the store you didnt have fancy new fanged steam

Slackware is still basically the same, only with newer packages. I remember it saved my ass in a major way back in 2008. I had an Athlon XP PC that for whatever reason most distros wouldn't boot on, and it needed to build the madwifi driver out of tree and install it to get on the network - much more challenging in the days before DKMS! Slackware was the only distro that both booted reliably and had a full dev toolchain right on the install media. That machine ran like a champ until I retired it a few years later due to needing to prune down on systems during a move to a new house.

i got redhat in 2002 from a CD that came with a $30 linux book

indeed the UI was vastly better than today's gnome / kde, and kde didn't suck that much then

i remember finding the grub spacebar bug when i was 13 not knowing it was a bug lel

In the late 90's I bought a book about Redhat with a CD-ROM to install it.

Was fun to play with but I never got very far.
We did have Unix at university.

Thats pretty much how I got started. Wanted to get started with Linux distributions for years, but it wasn't until I found a magazine that came with RedHat that I had the chance to get into it. I didn't have ADSL at home back then, so I couldn't simply download it. Outside of some MP3 and DivX libraries, everything was included on the CDs.

1995 Slackware CD from Library Book. Computer magazines had cds all the time too. I remember the installation was ass and took me a couple of days. You HAD to menuconfig the kernel and make your own initrd and use vi. Couldn't have been too hard as I was only 10 and knew comparatively little about computers. By the time I was not going to prom I was a hooded Emperor Palpatine of Linux.

>Outside of some MP3 and DivX libraries
classic lawyer/license problems with redhat.

bought the RedHat linux box at best buy for like $40, it was fucking awesomely painful but worked well.

>By the time I was not going to prom I was a hooded Emperor Palpatine of Linux.
kek, great story bro

This. My dad was a sysadmin back then and we've been a Linux only household since like 2002 because of that. I must say, those were different times.

>He wasn't spending 16 hours in the summer at the command line at age 8
Pbttttt what? Do you even computers?

I started messing with it. Bought Red Hat and Corel Linux from Best Buy. Liked Corel it had a lot going for it and was definitely geared towards desktop use. But they were a giant fucking pain and even with early internet there was not a lot of info when you really ran into something fucked. Interest fell away after about a year, keep telling myself now that I should have kept it up. I still know most of the basics though to be dangerous.

> Me in 1997. Go to Fry's Electronics and pick up a disk with Gentoo on it. No idea what the fuck it is. Install. Feel like a fucking caveman stumbling around in the dark because fire hasn't been invented. Eventually it starts to make sense.

What's a computer?

>implying windows at the time was better
windows was worse

whatever lets you sleep at night, lol

>windows was worse
I guess that's the reason as to why Linux dominates the desktop OS market.

The only thing that really sucked about Linux in the 90's was printing. You had to pass whatever you wanted to print through ghostscript because the dumb Bubblejet Printer you had only would work with windows. PCL/PS Laser printers were too expensive for home uses

this looks so comfy.

>normies always use the best product
okay.

*Takes Selfie*

I started with Slackware 4.0 in ~99 I think, configuring X was certainly a pain in the ass but the difference between now and then is YOU LEARNT SO MUCH. you had no choice, if you wanted a working system you had to figure shit out. you couldn't just Google stuff, there was no ArchWiki or Stack Overflow, you had to read man pages, help docs, books, etc.
I got X working fine (eventually), running WindowMaker like a true hax0r, but I honestly preferred the console so that's what I used 90% of the time. most of what I did was just irc and coding, and I mostly browsed using lynx or links and only opened X if I needed something graphical. I honestly miss those days.

>they had better setup tools then we have today
where did everything go so wrong

Fry's is so fucking GOAT

>walnut creek
they ran an smtp open relay in the 90's I would spam my friends from it.

does anyone unironically think that the GUI looks nice? I love those 90's/early 2000's interfaces

Tons of people are still using win98 theme.

think I might switch back to it. The ricing threads are starting to all look the same

>minimalist wallpaper
>terminal with no buttons
>i3
>one terminal opened to a random anime pic
>one terminal with matrix
>one terminal with vim on some random C code
>pastel color palette

Too bad moden programs (GTK3 ones mostly) look bad with Win98 theme.

compiling a kernel took forever, i remember my older brother who got a linux cd at college compiling for 24 hours just to install the os on a pentium 200mmx. everyone mostly uses binaries now. back then hardware was so slow you had to compile and prune away any unnecessary filesystem support and whatever options you could to speed up the pc.

>everyone mostly uses binaries now.
That's what we did in the 90's too.
Your brother was retarded.

We got cd's at computer shows.
6 cd's worth.

I got a book about linux, that had a CD in the back with SCO linux on it. It fucked up, though, and couldn't mound the hard disk read-write. Given my then-noob status with it I never figured out how to fix that.

Somewhat relevant, somewhat not, when I was in high school my Computer Systems and Maintenance teacher gave everyone in the class CDs with Ubuntu 6.1 to take home and use. That was my first experience with Linux.

That was the same teacher that let us set up a lan network in the loft above the classroom and play Quake for half of the semester.

I used red hat in the early '00. and it had much better performance in Quake 3 and in playing divx movies than windows 98, millenium and windows nt and 2000.

I got my first copy of Linux around 98/99 or so. I had an Amiga 1200 until then and I didn't like Windows. I had just built a new X86 machine and needed an OS, so went to PCWorld (UK), a brick and mortar store. They were selling boxed SuSE Linux. Three or four CDs and a manual from what I remember. There was no way I was downloading it on 56k dialup.

It was... painful to install. But I learnt so much.

Since 2003 here, and it's been better than windows since at least that far back, imo.

Used to run RedHat 5 and 6 on an Intel Pentium 2 250MHz CPU with 64Mb of RAM back in the mid '90s when I was at university. Shit was glorious. Yes I am an oldfag.

Does anyone know of a good GTK2/GTK3 retro theme with either a CDE or Motif or the like look? I can't fucking stand the "flat" look everyone is fucking jizzing themselves over.

i had similar experience with debian and windows xp, for some fucking reason i couldn't play doom but i tried on debian and fucking worked perfectly, i remember having a NVIDIA Vanta TNT 16 MB lol

>I can't even imagine the pain it was to use before the Internet.
Good thing the internet has existed for Linux's entire lifespan then...

CDE was pig disgusting. OpenLook was better.

OneStepBack is a NeXTStep alike theme. It works fucking GREAT with Window Maker.

Objectively wrong. OpenLook belongs in a classroom for retards and emotionally challenged.

Thanks user. I think I tried that one but didn't like it. I'll give it another spin. I seem to remember the GTK3 theme was fucked up.

That was due to an older release of the theme breaking a newer version of Gtk3 which has been fixed. I ran into the same thing.

Nice to see so many Slackware oldfags here.

In the late 90s the main issue imo was modem drivers and those fucking useless win modems... if you didn't have an ISDN connection you had to do a lot of kernel hacking and buy very specific hardware to get into the internet.

Yeah, that's why the CDE standard lasted what 4 years? it was shit.

Yes, the same people using Linux today.

>very specifc hardware
You mean a USR 56k external and a serial cable? Those things were everywhere.

>USR 56k external
or any external. I don't think they ever made "external winmodems"

The whole point of winmodems was cheapass internals that skimped on circuitry by punting most of the actual logic to the Windows driver, so no. They still the USR 56ks, mostly as out of band consoles for routers in datacenters. Fat finger a Cisco command and lock out your entire PoP? Dial in via modem and fix it.

>everywhere
Maybe in USA...

No place else counted in the 90s except Japan and several very specific parts of Europe.

t. burger

Yup, you're talking to a guy that had 5 csu/dsu's in an office. I had admin rights to a 3com total control modem bank and a cisco 1924 switch.

OpenLook was superceded by CDE...which lasted about 7 years when it was superceeded by Gnome and KDE.

Fun. I was a rackmonkey in datacenters for a few years as my first jobs living away from home.

youtube.com/watch?v=3bl1ZI-J6hM

>OpenLook was superceded by CDE
That's a funny way of saying "Sun/ATT threw the shitty UNIX players a bone and let them have the shitty MOTIF desktop to be a standard." OPENLOOK was far superior.

CDE was the only standard as defined by POSIX/The Open Group. That standard went defunct in 2000. Sun et al moved on to GNOME.
In 2005 Solaris 10 would warn you that CDE was insecure and nag you when you used it.

>tfw no POTS network left to do that