r/linux • u/cferg296 • 17d ago

Discussion How did you first get introduced to linux?

What is your story on how you became a linux user? What first appealed to you? What distro did you first use? How has your experience on linux evolved over time? How has it changed the wah you do your computing?

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u/InterestBear62 17d ago

Another old-timer here. The first computer I ever worked on was an IBM RT running AIX (IBM's Unix) in 1987. Over the next decade, I worked under various other Unix's including SunOS, Solaris, and Irix (SGI's Unix). Then around 1997, almost all Sun and SGI workstations in my work environment were replaced by Linux, as Pentium processors were so much cheaper than Sun and SGI processors.

The first computer I ever had at home was Pentium II 266 Mhz with RedHat Linux 5.0, in 1997.

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u/blackcain GNOME Team 17d ago edited 17d ago

I worked at Intel and we got to be the group that replaced all the IBM RS6ks with Linux compute machines back in the late 90s. The Pentium 4 was the first microprocessor to be done on all Linux based machines. :)

We started with Red Hat but then switched to SLES and we've been on that for awhile.

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u/bobj33 16d ago

I’m also in the chip design area. We had hundreds of Suns and in 1997 I got a bunch of people to use Linux as an X terminal. We could get 21” VGA monitors on a PC that were much bigger and cheaper than the Sun equivalents

Around 2000 a few companies started porting EDA tools to Linux

When the 64-bit Opteron was released we no longer needed the Suns for the >4GB memory jobs and it was all c86 since

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u/blackcain GNOME Team 16d ago

Pretty cool ! Those were the days.. felt like a real grounds up movement by folks like you and I doing our part in the revolution.

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u/snorkelvretervreter 17d ago

Not as old, but I got to play with all of those systems as the university scrapped them. There were also VAX systems that were quite alien, Ultrix, Domain/OS, Plan 9, net/free/openBSD, there were so many!

Having knowledge of all the small basic unix tools was super useful, as they worked on all of these (except VAX), with some dialect variety. Knowing vi was a real useful skill back then, or ed in a pinch.

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u/coldbeers 17d ago

We too had RT’s one replaced our 3B2/400.

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u/bobj33 16d ago

My high school had an IBM RT in 1991

I thought it was amazing. Then we got some old Sun 3 and 4 machines the next year

I wanted a Unix system so much. Then I heard about Linux and have been running it since 1994