13 Jan
2005
13 Jan
'05
3:12 a.m.
On Wed, 12 Jan 2005, Tom Jennings wrote:
<...>
cheap. I
think that was probably a big part of the initial attraction to
Linux: a Unix box of your own.
It didn't take much hardware to run a real unix in 1994, even:
http://wps.com/archives/wps.com.11Apr1994/wps-hardware.html It was stuff like *this* and not linux that made the
early internet
explode. No fault of linux, it simply wasn't around then.
Hi Tom.
Are you saying that Linux wasn't around in 1994?
(Ugh, and I had an UNLIMITED BSD/I site license, for
which paid
like $100 (seriously), from the "factory", talk about deals of the
century. Around 1995? It got sold with the rest of the assets of
tlg.net. I gave the original BSD/I box away a few years back to a
collector friend. I was storing glue in it (it once was just an
old box :-))
That's another part of the point: Linux was free. No site license
required. And it worked. Sure, even if most people could get an
unlimited BSD site license for the cheap price of $100, that was still a
barrier to wide mainstream adoption of Unix as a PC platform, considering
DOS was effectively free and it could do a lot of what you wanted.
Certainly not as much as a Unix system, let alone BSD/I, but the other
thing to keep in mind was that just KNOWING that a cheapish BSD license
was available was not widely known. Only those in certain college and
university CS circles might have known that. I certainly don't recall
knowing that you could get a BSD license in the little community college
where I took some CS courses. As far as I knew, SCO was the shit if you
wanted Unix on a PC (circa 1990-1991). This all changed when Linux came
out. It seemed like EVERYONE found out about it as it quite literally
took the hacker community by storm and spread quickly and widely.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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