** Ted Harding Ted.Harding@wlandres.net [2014-02-22 22:50]:
On 22-Feb-2014 14:19:40 mick wrote:
Ted
I have been reading my copy of (the first issue of) "Linux Voice". Page 17 of that magazine has an article about the founding of Sheffield LUG by Richard Ibbotson.
That article says:
"I remember back in the 1990s helping Manchester LUG to come into existence. Dr Owen Le Blanc, David Clarke, Dr Dave Gilbert, Professor Ted Harding and some other notables used to get together on Saturday afternoons to create the first LUG meeeting in the UK."
ISTR that you had a manchester.ac.uk email address before you used your own domain. So I assume said notable is you.
Care to tell us about it?
Best Mick
Mick Morgan gpg fingerprint: FC23 3338 F664 5E66 876B 72C0 0A1F E60B 5BAD D312 http://baldric.net
Hi Mick, Good memory! Happy to tell about it, though the story could get long!
<snip>
Then -- Miracle! The Manchester Computing Centre issued a regular newsletter, and Issue 35, April 1992 (which I have preserved) carried an announcement by Owen Leblanc (UNIX admin at MCC, and file-system developer):
Free PC Unixes available There are now two free Unix operating systems available for PCs: Linux and 386BSD.
The description of Linux led me to see it as preferable to 386BSD (in particular being able to co-exist with DOS via dual-boot), so next day I was round there with a couple of boxes of floppies, onto which Owen helped me to copy Linux (kernel version 0.96) in a local version called MCC Linux, and gave me complete and detailed instructions about installing it alongside DOS.
So I took these back home, partitioned my 40MB hard drive to allow 20MB for Linux, and installed it. Then I booted up and, Lo and Behold, the magic "# " root prompt in the command line! I then installed myself as a user, and never looked back!
At that time there were few people (outside MCC) interested in UNIX/Linux, though some Depts were major UNIX users. The main interest in Linux was a small core of people: Owen Leblanc, David (Nobby) Clark, Ian Pallfreeman, John Heaton, and a few others (to whom I quickly made myself known).
<snip> ** end quote [Ted Harding]
Interesting timing, that's about the time I first started taking an interest in Linux, although I didn't fully realise how new it was at the time. I was working at IBM in Havant and had recently purchased an IBM L40 laptop to be my first toe in the watter of the PC world (at that time I was a devout Amiga user, even to the extent of producing IBM advertising material on it, but that's another story!). At IBM we had an internal global network form mail (it could exchange mail with external networks if you set up an address on the gateway to act as a go between - which I did enabling me to send emails to my mum at Hampshire County Council!), what were referred to at 'tools disks' (a sort of FTP server to some extent although they were VM based, and I downloaded a lot of software from them to use - OS/2, Fortran, Prolog, Word Perfect and all sorts of fun internal use only stuff), and internal forums.
One of these internal forums was about getting Linux running on the L40 laptop so I subscribed and followed all the talk of kernel patches to get the floppy disk drive working and other fun things. Sadly though, work dictated that I run a dual boot of DOS/Windows and OS/2 on my laptop (a tight squeeze on an 80M HD), so I never got the opportunity to really play with Linux at the time, just follow along the discussions. I say dictated, it was more a case of getting experience to progress my job prospects, and it worked since it resulted in getting moved into the IT department after a while of being a nuisance customer ;)
Following this list I made plans to get a copy of Linux from a local (Fareham) based company called Lasermoon. By the time I had spare hardware to play with that version of Linux was merging with a distribution called Caldera and working hard towards Posix compliance certification, so that combined with a copy turning up in PC World resulted in me starting with Caldera OpenLinux 1.1 a few years later. A friend having a spare copy of Red Hat 5.0 resulted in a switch of distro and then in 2000 during the worst of the 'RPM hell' years and the advent of RPM 7 and compatibility issues I switched to Debian and have never looked back.
I still look back and wish I'd had the spare cash to get another machine to try Linux on sooner. It was an interesting process downloading software off the tools disks to my VM account and then transferring them to my PC and then onto a floppy. I also wish I still had copies of the forum posts, they would be an interesting archive. I do still have archives on my local LUG after I stumbled across it in around '98, although I have yet to sort out getting them extracted from the backups of my Turnpike software (I was with Demon Internet back then).
Anyhoo, enough reminiscing, I need to get back to OpenVPN, Wordpress and Linux backups (not directly linked projects).