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posted by mrpg on Thursday December 22 2016, @03:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the RAM-is-memory dept.

Take a walk down memory lane...

This is going to be long and rambling. If you're going to read it, you may want to wait until you're ill, and can't get out of bed, and your head is filled with cotton, and you're eating painkillers like they were candy. I don't want you to feel pain while reading. Being unconscious and having a speech synthesizer read it to you at high speed is an even better option.

Linux is 20 years old this year. That's a long time. Since I was there from the beginning I thought I'd share some memories of what's happened.

In 1988 I graduated from high school, and got accepted into the University of Helsinki to study computer science. The studies started in September, and also in September I got invited to join Spektrum, the Swedish speaking club for those studying math, physics, chemistry, geography, or computer science.

Spektrum is a social club, which was good, since I was, and remain, shy and socially awkward, and the club provided me with a way to easily meet people when I'd moved into a new city. That's also where I met the only other Swedish speaking new CS student of that year, a guy named Linus Torvalds.


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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday December 22 2016, @06:08PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Thursday December 22 2016, @06:08PM (#444786) Journal

    I suspect the article is referring to version 1 of the Linux kernel.

    Version 1.0 of the Linux kernel was released on 14 March 1994, which is what led distributions like Red Hat and SUSE to create their version 1.0 in that year. So, no, it's been more than 20 years since that too.

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  • (Score: 2) by mendax on Thursday December 22 2016, @08:36PM

    by mendax (2840) on Thursday December 22 2016, @08:36PM (#444832)

    Well, I was fiddling with the SLS distribution at that time (and the 40ish floppy disks that were required). I know the kernel was at 0.99 for a long time in that distribution. Why that was I don't know. Perhaps it was because I was lazy in updating it. After all, downloading 40 disks worth of stuff over a dial up as well as copying them to the floppies themselves was very time-intensive.

    --
    It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.