How I came to find Linux

http://ianmurdock.com/post/how-i-came-to-find-linux/

LAN Murdock

August 17, 2015

I saw my first Sun workstation in the winter of 1992, when I was a undergraduate at Purdue University. At the time, I am a student in the Krannert School of Management, and a childhood love of computers had just been reawake Ned by a mandatory computer programming course I had taken during the fall semester (we were given the choice between COBO L and Fortran-which Even in 1992 seemed highly dated-and I had picked COBOL because it seemed the ' business ' of the T WO).

Ten years or so earlier, my father, a professor of entomology at Purdue, had replaced he typewriter at work with an Apple ii+. Thinking his nine-year-old son might get a kick out of it, he brought it home one weekend along with a Space invaders-like Game he had bought at the local ComputerLand. I spent hours on the computer, that weekend. Before long, I was accompanying Dad to the lab at every opportunity so I could spend as much time on the computer as Possi ble.

Being a nine-year-old boy, I is, predictably, attracted by the games at first, and my interest on games LEDs to my first E Xposure to Programming:computer magazines This included code listings of very simple games, which I would laboriously key In to the Apple-and, after hours of toil, hope that I hadn ' t made a mistake (the Apple II, at least out of the box, Utili Zed a simple line editor, so going back and making changes is very tedious, not to mention finding the errors in the Firs T place).

Not long after, I met Lee Sudlow and hanging around the lab on weekends. Lee was one of Dad's graduate students and had begun to use the Apple-assist in his experiments. Lee is always happy to explain what he is doing as I hovered over his shoulder watching, he helpfulness no doubt Motiva Ted-at least in Part-by The fact, the snot-nosed Nine-year-old scrutinizing his every move is his faculty advisor's s Mnl Oblivious to such things, I watched with fascination as he punched code into the apple-code that he thought up himself, no T code that he is reading from a computer magazine.

Between learning by example through studying the code in the magazines and Lee's occasional tutelage, I was writing GAM ES and other simple programs before long, first in Applesoft BASIC and, later, 6502 assembly language. To encourage my growing interest, Dad eventually bought a Apple IIe for home, and my love affair with the computer Contin Ued for several more years. However, as I entered my teenage years, the computer is gradually replaced with more pressing things, like baseball, Musi c, and girls, and by the mid-1980s, the Apple is gathering dust in my bedroom closet alongside my collection of Hardy boy S novels and Star Wars action figures.

My obsession with the computer lay dormant for the next half-dozen years until it was fortuitously reactivated during T Hat COBOL Course in the fall of 1992. When the course ended, I naturally lost my account is on the IBM 3090 mainframe where we do our assignments and labs work. Fortunately, as a student, I was entitled to a personal account on one of the University Computing Center ' s machines, eith Er the IBM or one of three Sequent symmetry minicomputers running Dynix, a variant of the UNIX operating system. A friend convinced me that UNIX is more interesting and had a brighter the future than IBM's Vm/cms, and I took his advice an D applied for a account on one of the Sequent machines. The following week, I was the proud owner of a account on sage.cc, complete with the princely allocation of kilobytes of disk storage. (Yes, I ' m being sarcastic-500 kilobytes is a miserly sum, even for 1992.) I eventually found ways to circumvent it.)

My appetite for UNIX is ravenous that winter. I spent most evenings in the basement of the MATH building basking in the green phosphorescent glow of the Z-29 terminals, Exploring every nook and cranny of the UNIX system upstairs. It is eerily quiet in those terminal rooms, the only sound being the clack clack clack of a few dozen keyboards and the O Ccasional whisper of, "Hey, look in this ..." Often, after an evening of exploration, I would exit the building the long, walking past the plate glass window where The computing center housed its machines, gazing in awe at the refrigerator-sized Sequent symmetry I had just been using, Watching the blinking lights and knowing that hundreds of people were still inside, if only virtually, thanks to the magic of time-sharing, a technique advanced computers used to divide the machine ' s computational power among many users, provid ing the illusion that each user is the only one. Above all, I looked with envy at the system operators privileged ENough to sit in the other side of this plate glass window wielding the almighty power of the "Superuser" at the system con Sole.

Unsatisfied with the z-29s, I began prowling around campus after dark with a friend, Jason Balicki, to see what else could be found. Jason had been in the computer-a-few years, so he knew where to look (though we do our share of new E Xploration-that is part of the fun-entering buildings at night and trying the doorknobs of rooms that looked like they mi Ght hold computers to see if they were unlocked).

The best labs, I learned, were in the Engineering Administration building (referred to around campus by its unfortunate AC Ronym, Enad), where several rooms of X terminals offered a grayscale graphical interface to the Sequent and other UNIX Macs Hines around campus. Soon, my preferred "hacking" spot (a term Jason had introduced to me) is in one of the X Terminal Labs, which were Techni Cally engineering students, a restriction that is not enforced by Passwords-and, we dutifully ignored.

But the motherload of the Enad building is to being found in its labs of Sun workstations. Unlike the lowly z-29s and even the comparatively advanced X terminals, the Suns were things of beauty, with sleek cases a nd high-resolution color displays. Furthermore, Jason explained that they ran the best UNIX there was, SunOS, though the Suns were considerably better locked Down than the X terminals, requiring an account on the engineering computer network to access them, so I didn ' t get a cha nCE to actually get my hands on SunOS until much later.

I was also accessing UNIX from home via my Intel 80286-based PC and a 2400-baud modem, which saved me the trek across C Ampus to the computer lab in particularly cold days. Being able to get to the Sequent from home is great, but I wanted to replicate the experience of the Enad building ' s X te Rminals, so-one day, in January 1993, I-set out to find a X server that would run on my PC. As I searched for such a thing on Usenet, I stumbled across something called "Linux."

Linux wasn ' t an X server, of course, but it is something much better:a complete unix-alike operating system for PCs, SOM ething I hadn ' t even contemplated could exist. Unfortunately, it required a 386 processor or better, and my PC only had a 286. So, I began to save my pennies for a machine fast enough to run it, and while I do that, I devoured everything I could ge T my hands on about the object of my desire. A few weeks later, I posted a message to Purdue's computing interest Usenet group asking if anyone on campus was running L Inux-and got one response, from a computer science student named Mike Dickey, who happily invited me over to show me his L Inux Setup. Inspired, I bought a box of thirty floppy diskettes and began the slow process of downloading Linux to the floppies from a PC Lab in the Krannert building, though it would is another month before I could afford an actual computer on which to Stall it. Finally, I could wait no longer, and Jason and I found an unlocked computeR Lab in one of the dorms containing a single PC, and in the middle of the night one evening in February, we proceeded to Install Linux on that lab PC. I still occasionally wonder what's the unfortunate student first to the lab the next morning must has thought.

Linux had been created about a year and a half before by Linus Torvalds, a twenty-one year old computer science Undergradu Ate at Helsinki University. A long-time computer enthusiast, Torvalds had followed a path roughly similar to my own, though he began his programming C Areer on a Commodore Vic-20, and he hadn ' t gotten distracted by the more traditional interests of teenage boys as the ' 80s progressed. Torvalds ' first exposure to UNIX is in 1990 during a course on the university, and like me, it had been love at first Sig Ht.

In the fall of this same year, Torvalds took a course on operating systems that used the textbook operating Systems:de Sign and implementation by Andrew Tanenbaum, a professor of the computer science at Amsterdam ' s Vrije Universiteit. Tanenbaum ' s book taught operating systems by example through a UNIX clones for PCs he had written called MINIX, and his boo K included the complete source code-the human readable (and editable) programming Code-for MINIX along with a set of Flopp Y diskettes so this readers could actually install, use, and modify the operating system.

Intrigued, Torvalds bought a PC in early 1991 and joined the burgeoning MINIX community, tens of thousands strong and L Argely held together by the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix. He began experimenting not only with MINIX and also with the new task-switching capabilities of the Intel 80386 processor That's powered his PC. (Task-switching makes it easier to run more than one program on the processor at the same time, one of the requirements of A time-sharing system like the Sequent symmetry I would discover the following year at Purdue.) By the summer of 1991, Torvalds ' experiments and task-switching were beginning to evolve into a full-blown operating Syst EM kernel, the basic piece of software in an operating system. Mediates access to the CPU, memory, disks and other dev ICES in the computer and provides a simpler interface to these basic computing functions that allows complex applications To is written more easily. [I]

MINIX was isn't the only "hobbyist-friendly" operating system project, existed in 1991, though it is one of only a H Andful that is complete enough to being usable, and one of only a few that would run on the lowly PC. The best-known operating system project by far is GNU, presided over by Richard Stallman. Stallman, who had been programming since the mid-1960s and had been a systems programmer at MIT from 1971 to 1983, were an Old school "hacker," someone who engages in computing for it own sake and believes, militantly in some cases (including S Tallman ' s), that all information should is freely shared.

The GNU project ' s goal is to produce a free operating system (free is not a It could is freely modified) that is compatible with UNIX (GNU is a so-called recursive acronym for "GNU's not Unix," so -called because it employed a powerful technique often used by programmers called recursion that involves a computation us ING itself as one of its inputs). Stallman launched the GNU Project in 1983 on response to the growing market for proprietary software, software for which t He source code could not is modified and is often not even available.

Proprietary software is a fairly new development in the early 1980s and, to Stallman, a very disturbing one. Software had largely been distributed freely with hardware, and hackers often gkfx copies of its SOURC e code along with their own changes and improvements. Stallman considered the growing trend toward proprietary software nothing short of the first step toward a digital 1984 in Which computer users, and eventually all of society, would is held captive by greedy corporate interests, and he is dete Rmined to stop it.

By mid-1991, Stallman and a loosely-knit group of volunteers had assembled most of the GNU operating system-a compiler, A debugger, an editor, a command interpreter (or "shell"), and a variety of utilities and programming libraries that were Just like UNIX, only better-the GNU versions were almost universally held to being superior to their namesakes. The only piece is missing is the kernel, and a small team had just been created at Stallman's free software Foundat Ion, a non-profit organization he had formed in 1985 to oversee development of the GNU and serve as a guardian of sorts for FR EE software, to-write that final piece. Hackers around the world believed it would just BES a matter of time until GNU was finished and available, and they would f Inally a operating system free of corporate encumbrances.

Half a world away, Torvalds ' own operating system kernel is becoming complete enough to release to the world. In a now-famous Usenet posting to Comp.os.minix on August, 1991, he wrote:

Hello everybody out there using minix–

I ' m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won ' t is big and professional like GNU) for 386 (486) at clones. This have been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready. I ' d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in Minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the File-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

The response was immediate and overwhelming. While the everyone expected GNU to is done imminently, it is not available yet, at least not in a form this could be used wit Hout a UNIX scaffolding underneath. And while MINIX were popular, it was wasn't free, though it is certainly inexpensive compared to the other unixes. Perhaps most importantly, though, MINIX is intended primarily as a teaching aid, not production software, so Tanenbaum WA s loathe to include many of the patches, or changes to the operating system, which extended its capabilities which flowed I N daily from hordes of enthusiastic users around the world, fearing their addition would make MINIX too complicated and, t Hus, harder for he students to understand.

The lure of a unix-like operating system for PCs, no matter how imperfect, that is free and could evolve at the speed Its community wanted it to evolve is too much for many MINIX users to resist, and they began flocking in droves to Torval DS ' new OS, which in the fall of 1991 would be dubbed "Linux." But Linux is just a kernel-it required a variety of tools and applications be installed on top of it to make it actually Do anything useful. Fortunately, most of the these already existed thanks to Stallman ' s GNU project.

By 1992, a few intrepid users began to assemble sets of floppy diskette images this combined Linux with the GNU software T Ool chain to make it easier for new users to get up and running. These collections (later called "distributions") got progressively better, and by the time I finally got my PC in March of 1993, the Softlanding Linux System (or SLS) distribution had expanded to those thirty diskettes and now included a wealth of Applications-and, yes, the very same software that powered the X terminals in the Enad building.

I never do get around to trying to connect the linux-based X server now on my PC to the Sequent, which would has been PA Infully slow at 2400 baud-several thousand times slower than the speeds of today-anyway. Now I had my very own UNIX to explore right there on my desk. and explore I did, in a veritable UNIX crash course. Once I got over the thrill of being the "superuser," the unspeakable power I had previously seen only behind plate glass, I became enraptured much by Linux itself as by the process in which it had been created-hundreds of people hacking Away at their own little corner of the system and using the Internet to swap code, slowly but surely making the system bet ter with each change-and set off to make my own contribution to the growing community, a new distribution called Debian th At would is easier to use and more robust because it would is built and maintained collaboratively by its users, much like Linux.

How I came to find Linux