On 22/02/2014 21:23, (Ted Harding) wrote:
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Hi Mick, Good memory! Happy to tell about it, though the story could get long!
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Thanks Ted, that's an interesting story. Must've been fun to have been around Linux in those days. One thing...
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Free PC Unixes available There are now two free Unix operating systems available for PCs: Linux and 386BSD.
At that time, I was working for DEC in Brussels programming VAX Pascal on VMS. Myself and another bloke (sadly no longer with us) played around fairly seriously with Minix. I just checked Wikipedia and it seems that Minix came out in 1987, and V1.5 in 1991 had a major influence on Linus when he built Linux. I'm surprised Minix wasn't on your list. Maybe we got hold of it because we were at an American company with a world-wide network.
Having said that, Wikipedia has reminded me that Minix wasn't "free" (in any sense of the word), and I have a little bell clanging telling me that we (DEC) had a corporate licence of some kind. That would exclude it from a list of free PC Unixes!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINIX
On a side note, I have pretty well every email this list has ever had, and the first one was 7 April 1999, sent by Mark Ray. So, 15 years ago this year. Wow.
On another side note, apropos Paul Tansom's posting on this thread, my first serious foray into Linux was SuSE 5.1 in 1997. Like Paul, I was hit by the RPM hell of broken libraries and dependencies if one installed anything other than official packages. As we were running it as a commercial web-host this was a serious problem. We "found" Gentoo Linux in 2002, and I've stuck with it on CLI-based servers ever since. Sadly, it's falling in popularity, which is a shame because once understood, it's a great distro, albeit requiring quite a lot of attention with respect to updates.
Desktop? Linux Mint Cinnamon all the way.
Cheers, Laurie.