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From: rbowman <bowman@montana.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Windows tried to save the world from me
Date: 19 Apr 2024 04:43:20 GMT
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On Thu, 18 Apr 2024 21:29:00 -0400, Joel wrote:

> I have a lot of respect for the early adopters of Linux in the '90s and
> beyond.

I would UPS you my copy of Red Hat Linux Unleashed but the RH 5.2 CD is 
missing unfortunately. You could learn the mysteries of LILO, XF86Config, 
CDE, and other wondrous stuff. It was a step up from Slackware on 
floppies. Only about a quarter of the 800+ pages are about installing it 
and getting it running and building kernels. There are brief overviews of 
Apache, DNS, awk, Perl, Python, smtp, ftp, and so forth. By that time  
(1998) Linux was getting somewhat polished but it was sort of the hobbyist 
endeavor that DFS seems to remember.

Some of the earliest adopters were amateur radio operators:

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/AX25-HOWTO/

A Linux box, a modem, and a 2M transceiver and you were in tall cotton. I 
still have a modem although the serial port might take some work, radios, 
and maybe the modem to radio cable but 1200 baud packet radio lost its 
bloom a long time ago. For that matter 2M voice traffic on the local 
repeaters is rare given that everyone has a cellphone.