@rajprakash said:
How many of you 90s Linux folks, like me, have spent any time over at linpeople’s irc channel pre-freenode?
Wat
Seemed like there are a number of older heads in this thread that were Linux users in the 90s. A popular irc channel of that era was #linpeople on various networks (dalnet, efnet) before running their own network. Was curious if anyone frequented the channel in that timeframe; I spent tons of time there and that’s where I cut my teeth starting out running Slackware 96 at home.
@rajprakash said:
How many of you 90s Linux folks, like me, have spent any time over at linpeople’s irc channel pre-freenode?
Wat
Seemed like there are a number of older heads in this thread that were Linux users in the 90s. A popular irc channel of that era was #linpeople on various networks (dalnet, efnet) before running their own network. Was curious if anyone frequented the channel in that timeframe; I spent tons of time there and that’s where I cut my teeth starting out running Slackware 96 at home.
I get the feeling most of us are perhaps slightly too young for that - I was still at school in '96. I'm also not sure how many people actually had access to the internet until the very late 90's/early 00's.
I didn't sign up to an ISP for internet at home per se, but I did have a modem at home and shared a modem line at the university with one other colleague in 1997 (which itself was pretty decadent as I think the general modem pool was only 10 modems). I only ever really used it for emergencies though as call charges were about 5p per minute and even though the modems were 28.8k, they only worked reliably at 14.4k. If I actually needed to fix a server or something, I'd just cycle the 3 miles into campus instead.
The golden age for modems at home was the early 2000s when companies like Freeserve introduced the 1p/minute charges without a monthly fee.
I also remember buying a Slackware book back in 1997 because it included Slackware 3.2 on CD and by that point the minimal distribution had reached about 35 floppies and I couldn't face writing that many disks at work only to discover at home that one of them was corrupted and I had to wait another day before trying again. I don't think I ever even looked at the book itself, I only wanted it for its CD!
@ralf said:
I didn't sign up to an ISP for internet at home per se, but I did have a modem at home and shared a modem line at the university with one other colleague in 1997 (which itself was pretty decadent as I think the general modem pool was only 10 modems). I only ever really used it for emergencies though as call charges were about 5p per minute and even though the modems were 28.8k, they only worked reliably at 14.4k. If I actually needed to fix a server or something, I'd just cycle the 3 miles into campus instead.
The golden age for modems at home was the early 2000s when companies like Freeserve introduced the 1p/minute charges without a monthly fee.
I also remember buying a Slackware book back in 1997 because it included Slackware 3.2 on CD and by that point the minimal distribution had reached about 35 floppies and I couldn't face writing that many disks at work only to discover at home that one of them was corrupted and I had to wait another day before trying again. I don't think I ever even looked at the book itself, I only wanted it for its CD!
There was no internet at my school or college, so my first experience of browsing a website via the internet was actually through work at an event where they were demonstrating the potential future of the industry.
The main barrier to using the internet in the late 90's (in the UK at least) was the tying up the phone line in a time before most people had mobile phones. I ended up getting a second phone line installed in my parents house purely for my personal internet use (Demon as the ISP, remember them?), I remember my dad going ballistic when he saw the first quarterly bill - even though I was paying for it all, he couldn't comprehend how I was spending over £70/month on something he just saw as a waste of time.
@Nekki said: The main barrier to using the internet in the late 90's (in the UK at least) was the tying up the phone line in a time before most people had mobile phones.
Pre-internet I was dialing up "local" Commodore 64 BBS'es and tying up my parents phone line, so they got me my own line. Then I discovered telephone "phreaking" and next thing you know I was dialing up European and US cracking teams sites and downloading "importing" games and software in Canada. This was all when I was between 12-15.
While I was working as a sysadmin at the university, our uplink to JANET was upgraded from 2mbps for the entire university to 10mbps. That was a pretty big deal at the time!
Bringing it back to data storage, its also interesting at the time that I think the biggest drives we had were 1GB (maybe a couple of 2GB ones) and most of them were 500MB full height 5.25" monsters. I remember at the time the image processing group needed 10GB temporarily for some project, and we managed to cobble together that much storage with a massive stack of 500MB drives, all shared to that machine via NFS.
I keep wanting to not send this, as these numbers seem almost unimaginably small now and it feels like I've made a mistake, but I'm sure they're right.
Comments
How many of you 90s Linux folks, like me, have spent any time over at linpeople’s irc channel pre-freenode?
Wat
Seemed like there are a number of older heads in this thread that were Linux users in the 90s. A popular irc channel of that era was #linpeople on various networks (dalnet, efnet) before running their own network. Was curious if anyone frequented the channel in that timeframe; I spent tons of time there and that’s where I cut my teeth starting out running Slackware 96 at home.
I get the feeling most of us are perhaps slightly too young for that - I was still at school in '96. I'm also not sure how many people actually had access to the internet until the very late 90's/early 00's.
I didn't sign up to an ISP for internet at home per se, but I did have a modem at home and shared a modem line at the university with one other colleague in 1997 (which itself was pretty decadent as I think the general modem pool was only 10 modems). I only ever really used it for emergencies though as call charges were about 5p per minute and even though the modems were 28.8k, they only worked reliably at 14.4k. If I actually needed to fix a server or something, I'd just cycle the 3 miles into campus instead.
The golden age for modems at home was the early 2000s when companies like Freeserve introduced the 1p/minute charges without a monthly fee.
I also remember buying a Slackware book back in 1997 because it included Slackware 3.2 on CD and by that point the minimal distribution had reached about 35 floppies and I couldn't face writing that many disks at work only to discover at home that one of them was corrupted and I had to wait another day before trying again. I don't think I ever even looked at the book itself, I only wanted it for its CD!
There was no internet at my school or college, so my first experience of browsing a website via the internet was actually through work at an event where they were demonstrating the potential future of the industry.
The main barrier to using the internet in the late 90's (in the UK at least) was the tying up the phone line in a time before most people had mobile phones. I ended up getting a second phone line installed in my parents house purely for my personal internet use (Demon as the ISP, remember them?), I remember my dad going ballistic when he saw the first quarterly bill - even though I was paying for it all, he couldn't comprehend how I was spending over £70/month on something he just saw as a waste of time.
Pre-internet I was dialing up "local" Commodore 64 BBS'es and tying up my parents phone line, so they got me my own line. Then I discovered telephone "phreaking" and next thing you know I was dialing up European and US cracking teams sites and downloading "importing" games and software in Canada. This was all when I was between 12-15.
While I was working as a sysadmin at the university, our uplink to JANET was upgraded from 2mbps for the entire university to 10mbps. That was a pretty big deal at the time!
Bringing it back to data storage, its also interesting at the time that I think the biggest drives we had were 1GB (maybe a couple of 2GB ones) and most of them were 500MB full height 5.25" monsters. I remember at the time the image processing group needed 10GB temporarily for some project, and we managed to cobble together that much storage with a massive stack of 500MB drives, all shared to that machine via NFS.
I keep wanting to not send this, as these numbers seem almost unimaginably small now and it feels like I've made a mistake, but I'm sure they're right.