On Monday, February 18, 2002 10:18 AM, Laurie Brown wrote:
..... and ran my first PC Unix in about 1990. surprised not to hear it mentioned here yet: Minix. It was hard work, IIRC...
Yes Laurie, I too started playing with Andrew Tanenbaum's MINIX around 1987 after buying his excellent book "Operating Systems - Design And Implementation" (published by Prentice Hall). Even though MINIX was available to run on "old" PCs with only 256k RAM and I had a "powerful" PC with 512k RAM as standard I remember trembling as I eagerly upgraded my PC memory to "the full 640kB" and upgraded my floppy drive from the standard 360k five and a quarter disks to the "modern" 1.2M Double Sided Double Density five and a quarter so I could load and use the best version of MINIX available.
Several years later I "upgraded" to Slackware (can't remember version).
Then (1996?) "upgraded to Lasermoon's Linux-FT ver 1.1 which it's README file proudly proclaims was "the only Linux distribution to be developed against real UNIX and POSIX standards by X/Open members (ISV Council) demonstrating a commitment to UNIX standardisation and quality... The POSIX 1 certified release is the first Linux distribution to achieve POSIX.1 certification with the NIST... is the only 64bit clean Linux distribution to be ported to the Digital ALPHA range of processors... the forthcoming release will have full binary compatibility with Digital UNIX". Linux-FT ver 1.1 was based on kernel 1.2.13.
Ian.