Debian Founder: How I Came To Find Linux

An anonymous reader writes: Ian Murdock has pretty solid open source cred: in 1993 he founded Debian, he was the CTO of Progeny and the Linux Foundation, and he helped pave the way for OpenSolaris. He has published a post about how he initially joined the Linux ecosystem. Quoting: "[In 1992], 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. ... I was also accessing UNIX from home via my Intel 80286-based PC and a 2400-baud modem, which saved me the trek across campus to the computer lab on particularly cold days. Being able to get to the Sequent from home was great, but I wanted to replicate the experience of the ENAD building's X terminals, so one day, in January 1993, I set out to find an X server that would run on my PC. As I searched for such a thing on Usenet, I stumbled across something called 'Linux.'" How did you come to find Linux?

Comments

Re:The Bomb

[_merlin]

Heh, reading through these comments felt like those testimonials at pentecostal churches, "I found Jesus when..."

Re:How I Found Linux

[Kiaser Zohsay]

I became a UNIX bigot in college in the late 80's. I remember following William and Lynn Jolitz's series "Porting UNIX to the 386" in Dr. Dobb's in the late 80's/early 90's. My first experiences with DOS PC's were disappointing, as I saw them as a big step backwards. My first download was something called Monkey Linux. A zip file that spanned 5 floppy disks, that when extracted to a DOS directory was bootable as a UMSDOS FS running a derivative of Slackware. I followed a pointer to the official Slackware package mirrors, and never went back.