The intensity of feeling within the Linux community towards Windows and Microsoft back then was intense. I remember turning up to my university CS course and witnessing the formation of a Linux clique - if you ran windows you weren't really welcome! Dual-booting might get you reluctantly accepted though.
I wonder if the same thing still goes on. It probably was quite an effective filter for the nerdiest and most obsessive people back in 1999, and it probably still is, but somehow that kind of mindset seems a bit outdated today. If it does still exist I'd be interested to know what kind of status macOS has! Literally nobody on the CS course had a Mac, despite the very cool and colourful iMacs being very popular.
> but somehow that kind of mindset seems a bit outdated today
It's hard to understand today because Windows isn't by far the overlord it was in the late 90s and early 2000s. Alternatives like Amiga, Atari, SGI, Sun and even the Mac were dead or on their deathbed, and it looked like there would only be one operating system in the future, and one that wasn't exactly a triumph of engineering.
Thankfully that future didn't happen and Windows is essentially only relevant for running PC games today.
> Thankfully that future didn't happen and Windows is essentially only relevant for running PC games today.
What an odd statement. You’re ignoring the vast majority of all office computers all over the world here, the on-prem infrastructure of most companies, and cheap home computers. Not everyone can afford to buy a Mac; Office tools and huge swaths of domain-specific tools only run on Windows; and despite what Linux enthusiasts want you to believe, Linux doesn’t support existing Windows software well enough for common business use.
You may be referring to the needs of rich software engineers in western countries exclusively here, but overwhelming majority of the world’s client computers are firmly in Microsoft’s hands.
> The intensity of feeling within the Linux community towards Windows and Microsoft back then was intense.
Remember that Microsoft didn't really have an OS that didn't suck yet. Windows as we know it today did not exist, it was still Windows NT 4 and no directory. SQL Server 7 was released in 1998, but until that rewrite it was a product produced in large part another company (Sybase).
Exchange Server (~1996) was the first product Microsoft developed from the ground up to replace an awful product and it was wildly successful, even before real Windows/AD landed in 1999. SQL Server eclipsed Exchange as the flagship product around 2010 or so.
Macs were super popular on Ivy League campuses in the 1980's. Some schools sold Macs to students for $1,000 that retailed for $2,500. Some of the current Fedex Business Centers started as Kinkos locations that rented time on Macs by the hour.
Microsoft changed the education landscape when they offered most of their commercial products for 10% of retail. They also do this for 501c3 non-profits. I believe _students_ get a different discount (~50%).
Outdated or not, that mindset was inappropriate then and it's inappropriate today. Granted I don't necessarily expect kids in college to know how to behave, but it isn't cool to be a dick to people just because they use one OS or the other. It's especially sad when you consider that these are a bunch of nerds, who know what it's like to be a social outcast, and then turn around and inflict that on one of their own.
Fair enough, but this isn't about how cool it was that there were warring factions. There were reasons that the divide existed, and most of the reasons involved the behemoth Microsoft throwing its weight around and trying to bully the world of technology. People who ran Windows were seen as complicit, and in some ways, they actually were.
Especially at the time, saying that both sides were obviously bad people because they had a beef with each other is a little like saying the Dark Side and the Jedi should have just stopped being assholes to each other. It's not that simple.
The idea you could make value judgements about a person based on the operating system on their computer was obviously crazy, even at the time. That said, I think some people genuinely believed Microsoft was evil and people who used/bought their software were irresponsible. A bit like the way environmentalists might look at someone who drives a 6 litre V8 around the suburbs I guess. I personally find it easier to understand the environmentalist and never could get too worked up about "M$ WinBl0wz" but I am pretty sure there were people who felt it was their moral duty to boycott interaction with Microsoft users. However crazy that sounds when written down.
I had a professor firmly in the Linux camp. Whenever he had to touch a computer running windows he wore gloves and goggles just like people working in biohazard environment would dress. I found it amusing rather than antagonistic. It was also a great conversation opener to discuss pros and cons of Linux.
It's largely been replaced by tedious factional infighting. Particularly from younger Linux users.
Waaay too many folks (particularly in places like Mastodon) make "using Linux" the majority of their personality. They live and breathe Linux. Fighting to ensure that "Winblows" users understand that Arch Linux is *THE ONLY WAY!*
God forbid if you use a distro they don't then you're subjected to endless pithy criticism from on high about "well you wouldn't have this problem if you just used my distro!"
It was a time when you could be in some place outside the big meccas like SV and start a reasonably succesful company around simply developing some software package and selling it to a small to midsized companies in your region.
Even in big non-tech companies, tech people kind of were left alone in a distant building and as long as you had a suit and a tie for the very ocasional meetings with the civilized portion of your company you were mostly left alone.
Then, the business people started to slowly encroach into our domain, the project management people, their processess. I think that a lot of the early agile movement was kind of a immune reaction against it, until it was too coopted by the suit people.
Then the marketing consolidated and concentrated, and it was never the same since then.
> I think that a lot of the early agile movement was kind of a immune reaction against it, until it was too coopted by the suit people.
If you're in a hiring position it's important to be very, very selective about who you hire into any engineering management or even more agile-specific roles. I remembering interviewing for an "agile coach" in a previous role - the CTO thought we needed one - and the first two or three were basically the same: all had their acronyms and their flavours of how they'd memorised agile literature. Then one guy came in who did know all that, but was also ex-British Army and had a load of practical, insightful things to say. And that's who we picked, and he later became the head of engineering. Useful agile knowledge is practical and insightful. It's not theory.
"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
My friend Nick, with whom I worked on Linux stuff in this era, actually quoted that speech in reference to the free software scene sometime around the year 2000! I think you're the first person since then I've seen mention it in this context.
In 1998 it was a LOT more nerdy. To some of you youngsters now you'd be amazed at the primitiveness of the hardware. It was still in the "first adopter" stage from a commercial point of view.
CPU speed was measured in Mhz not Ghz. CPUs had one core. Memory was measured in MB (not GB) and machines with memory of 32MB or less was the norm. A big-screen was 1024x768 (and most folk didn't have that) and lots-of-color meant 256 colors.
The publically-accessable internet was in its infancy. Connection was through dial ip modem. There was no Google, no social media, no news media.
Most of the businesses we sold software to, we had to source the hardware for them as well. Computers in the home were "common" (but not really used for much apart from games.) And by common I'm thinking 10% or so, not 50%.
So yeah, still very nerdy. You still needed a good grasp of the command line, config of new machines was tricky, IRQ numbers were a thing. My best work was in Assembly language.
And very optimistic. It was clear the best was still to come, and the flaws were seen, but improving all the time. Every year brought new hardware, new software, and new "I didn't know a computer could do that).
Plus we were younger, so much younger than today. The world was our oyster. We might have been nerds, but we had gun working AND got paid to do so. It was a special time and I feel privileged to have lived through it.
In 1978 it was even nerdier than that. CPU speed was measured in kilohertz. Often programs were entered using toggle switches and output was on seven-segment red LEDs. Color displays were all but unheard of. Non-volatile storage was on cassette tape. I know that probably sounds like a Monty Python sketch, but I swear this is actually true. I saw it with my own eyes.
Now here is a mind-boggling thought: there will come a time in the not-too-distant future when today's technology will seem as quaint and primitive as what I have just described.
I remember trying to install Linux on a spare 386 with like 2MB of memory? Bought the SuSE book from the bookstore, tried to install it. Apparently the 2MB was not enough to expand the boot floppy, so I had to make a swap disk first. Everything from the paper manual.
It was pretty cool when it worked. I think I managed to serve a website from it and I used it as a fancy teletype.
MacOS 8.6 and Windows 95 OSR2.1 (the one that had good USB support, but no IE yet). Back then I loved to tweak my OS'es, I totally stripped them from anything it didn't need, tweaked the animations to be instant. Dual Celly 300A@450.
I think I installed a Windows 2000 beta somewhere in 1999 and stuck with that until they really ended support for it. Pretty consistent UI, lightweight. Ran most software including games, even when not officially supported.
Played with the MacOS X Betas, on hardware comparable to the first iPhone in terms of performance. Blue White G3 Tower.
I loved computers back then. Now they're just tools.
To add, lot of us assembled our own PC. Though I didn't build one, I routinely opened the cabinet for upgrading RAM/HDD, or to transfer large files through HDD.I clearly remember when I upgraded RAM from 32MB to 64MB, the speed bump was incredible. After a while it became so frequent that I didn't bother to close the side panel.
A side effect was that computer getting bricked was a normal affair, so we all had boot Floppy disks at hand along with CDs of all the important softwares. In fact I would routinely install things from scratch to get rid of all the freeware stuff that clogged the CPU & RAM.
As you said we were living on the cusp of two revolutionary changes at once, PCs and internet.
I wonder what do youngsters of today look back 20 years down the line and have similar fond feeling & memories.
> machines with memory of 32MB or less was the norm
My memory of 1998 is that 64mb-128mb was common by then.
Around then my main machine had 128mb, until 2001 when I switched to 256mb and a 1ghz cpu. I also had an older machine with 8mb that was given to me for free. I recompiled OpenBSD to exclude PCI support to get it to stop swapping, then it was pretty usable as a headless machine.
I have a broken memory of the time, because I swear I first came across Google as the better alternative to AltaVista in my last year at Uni in '96, but Wikipedia says Google arrived in '98, or at least the company was set up then, is it possible it was usable 2 years before they incorporated?
I had a 1ghz machine with a gig of RAM in 95. I had 100mb internet on lan and multi t3. Google was around before public launch in 98. You're a few years off. In 98 I had a sgi visual workstatuon with 4gb ram and 50gb HDD and was on the same hub as the t3s. This was at college of course. I had dsl in 00 and it was as fast as campus. My mom was the first non-commercial install in STL (she was kinda a techie but also a good mom to a cs student kid).
Summer of 95 I convinced her to get dialup so I could learn about this internet thing I figured would be big. I was about 2 years too late for that wave.
But yes things were way more primitive and the learning curve was high. I had to spend several hours on the phone with the ISP to get on dialup on Mac. They onboarded people on campus manually and sold Ethernet cards back then.
Yeah, back in the day you'd be considered tin-foil hat if you thought you were being tracked and surveilled online. These days, you're tin-foil hat if you think you can avoid it.
Microsoft was the big bad wolf, but at the time, most of what they did that was so horrible was capture market share. You could still use a computing device and then leave it alone and it would leave you alone, it wasn't trying to constantly ping you and notify you and make you feel left out and use all kinds of dark patterns to feed the addiction. These days, computing devices feel more like trickster adversaries than clunky-but-useful tools.
It was very funny a few years later in the early 2000 Linux started getting games and quite good quality desktop user interfaces. Lindows even had the first version of an App Store.
However, everyone was so busy thinking about being a better version of Windows and Mac that for the most part we didn’t think about phones. Windows and make themselves fell by the wayside to iOS and android.
Not really. Maemo/N900 and OpenMoko existed and worked well enough. The problem I think is more than Meego/Mer/Moblin was supposed to be equally open, but a customer ready version of that idea. It was delayed over and over again. By the time it existed, it was no longer a pure X11 based Linux distribution and more of an (too) early take on Wayland. It was also so late Microsoft made a powergrab and managed to kill it. Ubuntu mobile (and to some extent BlackBerry10/WebOS) then came and tried to take that crown, but by that time iOS and Android were too entrenched. Ubuntu mobile was also MIR/LibHybris, you can't really build your own DE/WM on it since its a monolith. So the FLOSS community waited/wasted 6 years waiting for some building blocks (and the hardware to go with them) to be ready and were left with nothing. By that time the ship had sailed and the world depended on "apps" to interact with everything and FLOSS can't challenge it.
Optimistic times always end when people who won power in them fight to hold on to increasingly more of it, and tend to only come back once they fail, stop, or fall.
Consider that the times were optimistic for those who were interested, motivated, capable, and in a position (even geographic) to learn about computers. But there were probably many people for whom the same time was not as optimistic, perhaps due to being automated or outsourced.
Probably true right now too, some are in optimistic times, and others not. Perhaps the proportions of the two groups varies.
If only SGI had made that darn laptop, we'd be rocking SGI Linux these days, and the fruity company would be a minor consideration to most nerds.
Alas, 'twas not to be. SGI, you glorious bastard, why did you have to make that deal with the devil ..
IMHO, the tech industry completely changed when nerds could by tiBooks, have an amazing Unix experience in a portable form, and still rip and play DVD's alongside the shell ..
What SGI had in its favor was the great hardware. This is, more or less, the selling point of "the fruity company" today, at least for those who don't know they can open a terminal.
For those who do, it's a competent Unix OS and certainly does the job. I never found IRIX great for servers either.
As a huge fan of SGI (and MIPS, prior to their rise) I like to project SGI's wonderful hardware into the realm of laptops.
It was a huge surprise that the Fruit Company were the ones to come out with really robust, affordable (at the time) Unix-based laptops .. all the issues with Irix would have become relatively irrelevant had SGI built the laptop and had their Linux team work on the case.
Ah well, an alternative timeline I will visit when the technology to do so becomes more widely available. ;)
By then I had moved on to FreeBSD, I think starting at 3.?. The main reason for that move was internet access. FreeBSD CD set came with additional CDs of their ports collection. No more downloading via my flaky and very slow phone connection (via kermit).
I went back to Linux around 4.8 because FreeBSD started having issues with my hardware. By then I had "real" internet thanks to the company I worked for.
I remember seeing items about this, but the BSD people tended not to care about these things. But a nice look back
This is actually how I was introduced to FreeBSD as well. I was a high school student in 2004 who had a hand-me-down PC that one of my high school teachers gave me. It had a 475MHz AMD K6-2 processor, 64MB RAM, and a 8GB hard drive that was running Windows 98. I learned about Linux in the spring of 2004, and I had Zipslack, which was a version of Slackware Linux that ran on top of DOS. I wanted to try Gentoo, but I had dial-up at home. At least Zipslack was small enough to make the download via dial-up bearable.
During the summer of 2004 I took an introductory computer science course at Sacramento City College. The professor was a big fan of FreeBSD. He convinced me to try it instead of Gentoo, and he gave me some CDs that he burned containing FreeBSD and plenty of FOSS software. I ended up installing FreeBSD on my PC, and I fell in love with it. It was my daily-driver OS until the summer of 2006, when I was able to use some of my internship earnings to purchase a MacBook, my first brand-new computer and my first modern Mac. I still use FreeBSD whenever I need a Unix and when I don’t need to use Linux-specific software.
I use Linux daily (command line only) alongside Windows. It's amazing to think that after all these years, Linux on the desktop (with GUI) still isn't even close to windows in terms of functionality.
I've tried it over they years and finally gave up. It would work for awhile, until some random change would break something I used every day and I wasn't interested in spending many hours trying to research a fix and manually hack some .c file to make it work.
MacOS essentially became a form of Unix with a fantastic GUI. It's what Linux could have been. I like to use Linux with the windows WSL and I get the best of both worlds: a nice GUI and the ability to run all of my favorite Linux apps.
I have 3 machines at my desk (with 3 monitors) one running Ubuntu, (and a bunch VMs) one with Windows 11, and a Mac. They use the same keyboard and mouse, and I can move my mouse cursor and keyboard focus across the three OSes easily (I use synergy to do this).
My experience with the desktops across all the OSes largely similar. They do things differently, but once you get used to the OS, it becomes second nature.
Linux is my preferred environment for anything to do with development. I use my Windows machine for office productivity (Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint browsing) and VisualStudio. I use my Mac for the Adobe creative suite and Figma and iOS/visionOS development.
The difference in OSes isn't the desktop itself. It's the software that runs on it. I don't really want use GIMP on Linux for example, or do web dev on Windows.
I would argue that you’re doing a bad job using those OSes through software like Synergy, which doesn’t really understand things like multitouch or smooth scrolling.
To be honest I've never had issues like you're describing and I've been using Linux nearly exclusively as a desktop OS since the 2010s. The main deficiency is that it doesn't have eg a good Photoshop alternative, but what's there works well-- and these days the browser has supplanted most native proprietary software, anyway. Things have only broken for me when I've hacked/customized them to the point that it's a miracle they work at all.
OTOH, Windows has never given me anything but trouble... stuff that's easy on Linux semi-frequently required regedit hacks. I remember having to mess with some DCOM thing and ended up hosing my Windows install. Not to mention that it's awfully slow without installing a bunch of debloating tools (and even then...).
Windows is a complete subscription hell, with annoying pop-ups unless you regularly pay Microsoft etc. fairly large amounts, and then there's the commercials and MSN. My mother switched to Linux because she felt that she with Windows didn't have a real computer, but that Microsoft had a computer she borrowed.
It was never great-- there was always bloat, but recently it's crossed a line of unusability where the OS itself is more distracting than useful.
I was gonna (silently) disagree with you, but in the last couple of weeks I updated Windows and now it's periodically asking if it can know my location. I'm not clear if Windows is asking, or it's asking on behalf of a specific app, or so it can give this info to any app that wants it. And I don't care - the answer is no, no matter how many times it asks.
I always admired Linux, and was able to get around in Linux, but never seriously considered using it until that MS AI thing that works by taking a screenshot every couple of seconds. And now this pester-ware asking for my location.
I'm interested to know what breaks in the Linux desktop experience.
I've been using Linux exclusively as a desktop environment at home for 5 years or more and my primary pain point is kernel updates breaking DisplayLink, via a docking stattion I use for multiple monitors. I now have a specific command line that rolls back the kernel to the previous version, and then I wait for updated DisplayLink drivers.
It's a pain, but it's still (much!) better than the circles of hell that Windows has been putting users through since Windows 7.
Strangely, the Windows laptop provided by my work just stopped being able to pipe audio through the speakers plugged into the docking station. Which feels like Windows "doing a Linux". The tables are turning?
I don't think that I've ever had an issue like that on Windows. Their business practices with the ads and whatnot are awful, but the drivers and hardware work very, very well. Honestly even as a pretty knowledgeable person I don't consider your situation to be acceptable, much less someone who isn't knowledgeable. "You have to roll back the kernel" is just not reasonable to expect of people.
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I wonder if the same thing still goes on. It probably was quite an effective filter for the nerdiest and most obsessive people back in 1999, and it probably still is, but somehow that kind of mindset seems a bit outdated today. If it does still exist I'd be interested to know what kind of status macOS has! Literally nobody on the CS course had a Mac, despite the very cool and colourful iMacs being very popular.
It's hard to understand today because Windows isn't by far the overlord it was in the late 90s and early 2000s. Alternatives like Amiga, Atari, SGI, Sun and even the Mac were dead or on their deathbed, and it looked like there would only be one operating system in the future, and one that wasn't exactly a triumph of engineering.
Thankfully that future didn't happen and Windows is essentially only relevant for running PC games today.
What an odd statement. You’re ignoring the vast majority of all office computers all over the world here, the on-prem infrastructure of most companies, and cheap home computers. Not everyone can afford to buy a Mac; Office tools and huge swaths of domain-specific tools only run on Windows; and despite what Linux enthusiasts want you to believe, Linux doesn’t support existing Windows software well enough for common business use.
You may be referring to the needs of rich software engineers in western countries exclusively here, but overwhelming majority of the world’s client computers are firmly in Microsoft’s hands.
That, and running 73% of the world's desktops. [1]
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
Remember that Microsoft didn't really have an OS that didn't suck yet. Windows as we know it today did not exist, it was still Windows NT 4 and no directory. SQL Server 7 was released in 1998, but until that rewrite it was a product produced in large part another company (Sybase).
Exchange Server (~1996) was the first product Microsoft developed from the ground up to replace an awful product and it was wildly successful, even before real Windows/AD landed in 1999. SQL Server eclipsed Exchange as the flagship product around 2010 or so.
Macs were super popular on Ivy League campuses in the 1980's. Some schools sold Macs to students for $1,000 that retailed for $2,500. Some of the current Fedex Business Centers started as Kinkos locations that rented time on Macs by the hour.
Microsoft changed the education landscape when they offered most of their commercial products for 10% of retail. They also do this for 501c3 non-profits. I believe _students_ get a different discount (~50%).
Especially at the time, saying that both sides were obviously bad people because they had a beef with each other is a little like saying the Dark Side and the Jedi should have just stopped being assholes to each other. It's not that simple.
Waaay too many folks (particularly in places like Mastodon) make "using Linux" the majority of their personality. They live and breathe Linux. Fighting to ensure that "Winblows" users understand that Arch Linux is *THE ONLY WAY!*
God forbid if you use a distro they don't then you're subjected to endless pithy criticism from on high about "well you wouldn't have this problem if you just used my distro!"
And of course an IBM Thinkpad T42.
Tech felt more nerdy and optimistic. It had its share of problems, but I miss some of the idealism.
It was a time when you could be in some place outside the big meccas like SV and start a reasonably succesful company around simply developing some software package and selling it to a small to midsized companies in your region.
Even in big non-tech companies, tech people kind of were left alone in a distant building and as long as you had a suit and a tie for the very ocasional meetings with the civilized portion of your company you were mostly left alone.
Then, the business people started to slowly encroach into our domain, the project management people, their processess. I think that a lot of the early agile movement was kind of a immune reaction against it, until it was too coopted by the suit people.
Then the marketing consolidated and concentrated, and it was never the same since then.
If you're in a hiring position it's important to be very, very selective about who you hire into any engineering management or even more agile-specific roles. I remembering interviewing for an "agile coach" in a previous role - the CTO thought we needed one - and the first two or three were basically the same: all had their acronyms and their flavours of how they'd memorised agile literature. Then one guy came in who did know all that, but was also ex-British Army and had a load of practical, insightful things to say. And that's who we picked, and he later became the head of engineering. Useful agile knowledge is practical and insightful. It's not theory.
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
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CPU speed was measured in Mhz not Ghz. CPUs had one core. Memory was measured in MB (not GB) and machines with memory of 32MB or less was the norm. A big-screen was 1024x768 (and most folk didn't have that) and lots-of-color meant 256 colors.
The publically-accessable internet was in its infancy. Connection was through dial ip modem. There was no Google, no social media, no news media.
Most of the businesses we sold software to, we had to source the hardware for them as well. Computers in the home were "common" (but not really used for much apart from games.) And by common I'm thinking 10% or so, not 50%.
So yeah, still very nerdy. You still needed a good grasp of the command line, config of new machines was tricky, IRQ numbers were a thing. My best work was in Assembly language.
And very optimistic. It was clear the best was still to come, and the flaws were seen, but improving all the time. Every year brought new hardware, new software, and new "I didn't know a computer could do that).
Plus we were younger, so much younger than today. The world was our oyster. We might have been nerds, but we had gun working AND got paid to do so. It was a special time and I feel privileged to have lived through it.
Now here is a mind-boggling thought: there will come a time in the not-too-distant future when today's technology will seem as quaint and primitive as what I have just described.
It was pretty cool when it worked. I think I managed to serve a website from it and I used it as a fancy teletype.
MacOS 8.6 and Windows 95 OSR2.1 (the one that had good USB support, but no IE yet). Back then I loved to tweak my OS'es, I totally stripped them from anything it didn't need, tweaked the animations to be instant. Dual Celly 300A@450.
I think I installed a Windows 2000 beta somewhere in 1999 and stuck with that until they really ended support for it. Pretty consistent UI, lightweight. Ran most software including games, even when not officially supported.
Played with the MacOS X Betas, on hardware comparable to the first iPhone in terms of performance. Blue White G3 Tower.
I loved computers back then. Now they're just tools.
Now the only thing I know are compilers :-)
To add, lot of us assembled our own PC. Though I didn't build one, I routinely opened the cabinet for upgrading RAM/HDD, or to transfer large files through HDD.I clearly remember when I upgraded RAM from 32MB to 64MB, the speed bump was incredible. After a while it became so frequent that I didn't bother to close the side panel.
A side effect was that computer getting bricked was a normal affair, so we all had boot Floppy disks at hand along with CDs of all the important softwares. In fact I would routinely install things from scratch to get rid of all the freeware stuff that clogged the CPU & RAM.
As you said we were living on the cusp of two revolutionary changes at once, PCs and internet.
I wonder what do youngsters of today look back 20 years down the line and have similar fond feeling & memories.
My memory of 1998 is that 64mb-128mb was common by then.
Around then my main machine had 128mb, until 2001 when I switched to 256mb and a 1ghz cpu. I also had an older machine with 8mb that was given to me for free. I recompiled OpenBSD to exclude PCI support to get it to stop swapping, then it was pretty usable as a headless machine.
I have a broken memory of the time, because I swear I first came across Google as the better alternative to AltaVista in my last year at Uni in '96, but Wikipedia says Google arrived in '98, or at least the company was set up then, is it possible it was usable 2 years before they incorporated?
Sixteen- and twenty-four-bit color weren't just widespread by 1998. They were standard.
Not supporting 24 bit color was unheard of for a normal desktop monitor and normal desktop graphics.
Summer of 95 I convinced her to get dialup so I could learn about this internet thing I figured would be big. I was about 2 years too late for that wave.
But yes things were way more primitive and the learning curve was high. I had to spend several hours on the phone with the ISP to get on dialup on Mac. They onboarded people on campus manually and sold Ethernet cards back then.
Microsoft was the big bad wolf, but at the time, most of what they did that was so horrible was capture market share. You could still use a computing device and then leave it alone and it would leave you alone, it wasn't trying to constantly ping you and notify you and make you feel left out and use all kinds of dark patterns to feed the addiction. These days, computing devices feel more like trickster adversaries than clunky-but-useful tools.
Not so fast. They've been at it for a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
However, everyone was so busy thinking about being a better version of Windows and Mac that for the most part we didn’t think about phones. Windows and make themselves fell by the wayside to iOS and android.
Probably true right now too, some are in optimistic times, and others not. Perhaps the proportions of the two groups varies.
Alas, 'twas not to be. SGI, you glorious bastard, why did you have to make that deal with the devil ..
IMHO, the tech industry completely changed when nerds could by tiBooks, have an amazing Unix experience in a portable form, and still rip and play DVD's alongside the shell ..
For those who do, it's a competent Unix OS and certainly does the job. I never found IRIX great for servers either.
It was a huge surprise that the Fruit Company were the ones to come out with really robust, affordable (at the time) Unix-based laptops .. all the issues with Irix would have become relatively irrelevant had SGI built the laptop and had their Linux team work on the case.
Ah well, an alternative timeline I will visit when the technology to do so becomes more widely available. ;)
I went back to Linux around 4.8 because FreeBSD started having issues with my hardware. By then I had "real" internet thanks to the company I worked for.
I remember seeing items about this, but the BSD people tended not to care about these things. But a nice look back
During the summer of 2004 I took an introductory computer science course at Sacramento City College. The professor was a big fan of FreeBSD. He convinced me to try it instead of Gentoo, and he gave me some CDs that he burned containing FreeBSD and plenty of FOSS software. I ended up installing FreeBSD on my PC, and I fell in love with it. It was my daily-driver OS until the summer of 2006, when I was able to use some of my internship earnings to purchase a MacBook, my first brand-new computer and my first modern Mac. I still use FreeBSD whenever I need a Unix and when I don’t need to use Linux-specific software.
You just had to endlessly swap between the different CDs because the dependency resolution wasn't very smart about that. Fun stuff :-)
I've tried it over they years and finally gave up. It would work for awhile, until some random change would break something I used every day and I wasn't interested in spending many hours trying to research a fix and manually hack some .c file to make it work.
MacOS essentially became a form of Unix with a fantastic GUI. It's what Linux could have been. I like to use Linux with the windows WSL and I get the best of both worlds: a nice GUI and the ability to run all of my favorite Linux apps.
My experience with the desktops across all the OSes largely similar. They do things differently, but once you get used to the OS, it becomes second nature.
Linux is my preferred environment for anything to do with development. I use my Windows machine for office productivity (Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint browsing) and VisualStudio. I use my Mac for the Adobe creative suite and Figma and iOS/visionOS development.
The difference in OSes isn't the desktop itself. It's the software that runs on it. I don't really want use GIMP on Linux for example, or do web dev on Windows.
Personally, I find any development on Windows to be a pain!
OTOH, Windows has never given me anything but trouble... stuff that's easy on Linux semi-frequently required regedit hacks. I remember having to mess with some DCOM thing and ended up hosing my Windows install. Not to mention that it's awfully slow without installing a bunch of debloating tools (and even then...).
It was never great-- there was always bloat, but recently it's crossed a line of unusability where the OS itself is more distracting than useful.
I always admired Linux, and was able to get around in Linux, but never seriously considered using it until that MS AI thing that works by taking a screenshot every couple of seconds. And now this pester-ware asking for my location.
I've been using Linux exclusively as a desktop environment at home for 5 years or more and my primary pain point is kernel updates breaking DisplayLink, via a docking stattion I use for multiple monitors. I now have a specific command line that rolls back the kernel to the previous version, and then I wait for updated DisplayLink drivers.
It's a pain, but it's still (much!) better than the circles of hell that Windows has been putting users through since Windows 7.
Strangely, the Windows laptop provided by my work just stopped being able to pipe audio through the speakers plugged into the docking station. Which feels like Windows "doing a Linux". The tables are turning?
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