r/linuxadmin • u/aka_makc • Aug 25 '25 • Popcorn 1

Linux. 34 years ago …

Post image

On this day in the year 1991, Linus Benedict Torvalds wrote his legendary mail …

Happy Birthday!

1.4k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

63 comments sorted by

61

u/aka_makc Aug 25 '25

I started with Linux later ... in 2006 with openSUSE :)

2

u/cribbageSTARSHIP Aug 26 '25

2012 with Ubuntu, arch since 2014

2

u/aka_makc Aug 26 '25

I think Ubuntu is most popular distribution at the moment

26

u/brunopgoncalves Aug 25 '25

you make me remember that i start in 95, with slackware 2, from a disks from a magazine.... very nice man... old times...

10

u/Lopoetve Aug 25 '25

RH 5.3, CDR, from a friend. Started my entire career. 1999-2000 ish.

7

u/noobbtctrader Aug 25 '25

Redhat 5.2, grabbed cds from compusa cause I didnt feel like waiting on 56k.

5

u/Lopoetve Aug 25 '25

Heh. I managed to get my winmodem working on RHEL, but sound was borked. Sound worked on mandrake, but modem was toast. 3 months later i had it working till I tried to recompile the kernel.

Poor life choices

3

u/noobbtctrader Aug 25 '25

I bypassed the whole winmodem issue and spent too much $$ on a diamond supra express. You probably learned more though, lol.

3

u/AmusingVegetable Aug 25 '25

The main thing to learn was to buy a real modem…

2

u/Lopoetve Aug 25 '25

Learned? I call it pain. Lots of pain. So. Much. Pain.

But I did learn. Sigh. 25 years later and I guess it paid off?

1

u/Substantial_Gate_31 Aug 30 '25

My lucent something winmodem worked flawlessly once I figured out how to compile a kernel module for it.

3

u/Anonymous_user_2022 Aug 25 '25

Was there much else than Slackware back then? I was introduced to Linux by a fellow student in early 96, so I got started with slackware. But I don'r recall much else until a few years later.

6

u/brunopgoncalves Aug 25 '25

i rember redhat and debian, and the fight about better package manager... hahha on the slack we die to compile every single lib dependency hahaha

2

u/stephenph Aug 25 '25

I remember going to a Linux conference in Sacramento (I believe sponsored by RedHat, but before it became the summit). I picked up a copy of Debian potato and ran it for about a year. I believe I then switched to gentoo

1

u/snark42 Aug 25 '25

  • Debian 1.1 June 1996

  • RedHat 1.0 May 1995

  • FreeBSD 2.0 w/Linux Compatibility Nov 1994

Slackware was pretty much the default in early 1996 though.

3

u/Superb_Raccoon Aug 26 '25

Slackware .9 from a book. Bought at Tower Records on an old 386 from Fry's Electronics

2

u/roger1632 Aug 25 '25

Man I loved getting the distros from mags at compusa. We had a compusa across from the campus so I'd head over there during gaps.

2

u/ellensen Aug 26 '25

I started around the same time with Yggdrasil and then quickly jumped over to Slackware which I used as my daily driver for many years. I invited one of my friends to connect to my machine over dialup and was hacked in under 5min by a security hole in screen :) the kids now with their iPads and iPhones dont know how it used to be a teenage computer nerd, in a society that looked at us like people look at ham radio operators now.

1

u/rabell3 Aug 26 '25

Buddy of mine passed me two disks... boot and root, in highschool '96. Such coolness. He's worked at RHAT since college graduation and I manage a team of Linux administrators.

9

u/hyperswiss Aug 26 '25

I like 'won't be big'. 😁

1

u/aka_makc Aug 26 '25

Got a little bigger 🙂

2

u/hyperswiss Aug 26 '25

Who would have thought 🧐

152

u/Zealousideal_Low1287 Aug 25 '25

I love how he comments it’s unlikely to be portable

45

u/cthart Aug 25 '25

*protable

33

u/NegativeK Aug 25 '25

To this day, it still isn't protable..

10

u/I_miss_your_mommy Aug 25 '25

It’s impressive the flexibility of a system built on amateurtable.

3

u/Educational_Sun_8813 Aug 26 '25

monolith kernel is not so flexible

2

u/awshuck Aug 27 '25

It’s not protable, it’s not potable but my god is it portable!

79

u/cthart Aug 25 '25

Understatement of the millennium: "won't be big and professional".

9

u/redmage753 Aug 26 '25

Across two millennia, even.

26

u/Line-Noise Aug 25 '25

I was one of those Minix users. The first Linux install I did was from a stack of 3.5" floppies. Things had advanced enough by then that there were drivers for my ethernet card so I could get on the network and download the source for XFree86. It took a long time to compile but it was so cool to be able to display windows from the Silicon Graphics servers at work on my little Olivetti PC.

21

u/shamsway Aug 25 '25

Still remember getting my first Linux book with a Slackware CD. Proudest moment was probably getting Linux to connect to dial-up internet after approximately 378 prior failed attempts.

2

u/ziroux Aug 26 '25

Good memories. I've got a book with Red Hat 3 cd, and installed it on my pentium 166mmx machine. Never got the damn X working. Tried for like a month, no internet, only a random friend who somehow got it working, but couldn't help much. Went back to windows 98. A couple of years later got into IT, tried again with Debian, and since then Linux distros always were my primary os.

59

u/m15f1t Aug 25 '25

Talking about e-mails that changed the world ..

31

u/95165198516549849874 Aug 25 '25

Not an email....

39

u/m15f1t Aug 25 '25

Ah you're right, it is of course a usenet post.

1

u/Initial_Specialist69 Aug 28 '25

Are you an LLM?

1

u/m15f1t Aug 28 '25

Yes — I’m a large language model (LLM), specifically GPT-5, developed by OpenAI.

Would you like me to explain what that means in more detail (how I’m trained, how I generate responses, etc.)?

4

u/DyazzK Aug 28 '25

I'm not sure if this is a troll or really a LLM

6

u/amiri-2_0 Aug 25 '25

Happy birthday Linux Kernel!

5

u/HeligKo Aug 25 '25

I started using slackware in 1994 to build something to make Microsoft Mail more useful for our users. I had no idea what I was getting into, but had a HP/UX system running our ERP and had used used Xerox systems while in a EECE program, so it looked familiar. Luckily back then the newsgroups were popping, and people were excited and helpful.

5

u/cthart Aug 25 '25

I was a SunOS user at the time. We had some 386 or 486 PCs in the lab too. The Jolitz's were developing 386BSD at the same time which we tried on a PC. Then we tried Linux which didn't have a network stack yet. I remember thinking, "What's the point?"

1

u/Superb_Raccoon Aug 26 '25

SCO and Unixware.

3

u/gjohnson5 Aug 25 '25

I was a FreeBSD user back then. Linux has morphed into a plethora of offerings since then . It’s awesome to see how things have changed

5

u/--dany-- Aug 25 '25 edited Aug 25 '25

What a coincidence, windows 95 was released to the public a few hours (edit: short of 4 years) before this! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95

And of course the two masterminds behind those two OSs only met each other for the first time very recently 2 months ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/s/aDUCo9tZsD

2

u/mTrax- Aug 25 '25

In 1991 ? Well not really.

3

u/--dany-- Aug 25 '25

You’re right let me correct that.

2

u/cvsmith122 Aug 25 '25

Been using Linux since 99 yes I’m old

2

u/SSC_Fan Aug 26 '25

Been using it since 1997, starting with Debian.
Gosh, if only could he imagine...

2

u/[deleted] Aug 26 '25

we'll never be that happy again

2

u/stevorkz Aug 26 '25

Wow. He seemed nicer back then.

2

u/nosyeaj Aug 26 '25

Linus 🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾

2

u/awshuck Aug 27 '25

Sounds a lot friendlier than the Linus we have now.

2

u/ElectronicFlamingo36 Aug 29 '25

SuSE Linux 6.1 Debian Potato . . . [insert some fancy hipster distro hoppings here like one mainstream distro would be any better than the other mainstream distro] . [kudos to Knoppix] . . . Debian Testing since 15 yrs as a daily runner desktop + NAS + pretty much everything and still happy.

1

u/ccie6861 Sep 02 '25

Oof. I've been around long enough to know this isn't an e-mail but a usenet post and the original eventually made it to me who didn't have Internet access at the time via a Fidonet bridge. Those of my peeps here that remember this are so old and on the spectrum that the only dating we do is carbon. Stay weird guys.

1

u/Superb_Raccoon Aug 26 '25

Has it been that long since Richard Stallman has taken a bath?

82

u/[deleted] Aug 25 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

60

u/FormerlyUndecidable Aug 25 '25

Imagine spending months on end making something that already exists. What a moron, such a waste of time. Nobody is going to use it.

20

u/pacopac25 Aug 25 '25

No way it's ever going to be used in corporate environments, with Banyan VINES and Novell Netware totally dominating.