I gave a talk about the early days of linux at the jubilee symposium arranged by the University of Helsinki CS department. Below is an outline of what I meant to speak about, but the actual talk didn't follow it exactly. You can compare these to the video once it comes online.
Linus and I met at uni, the only 2 Swedish speaking new students that year, so we naturally migrated towards each other. After a year away for military service, got back in touch, summer of C & Unix course fall of 1990; Minix. Linus didn't think atime updates in real time were plausible, but I showed him; funnily enough, atime updates have been an issue in Linux until fairly recently, since they slow things down (without being particularly useful) Jan 5, 1991 bought his first PC (i386 + i387 + 4 MiB RAM and a small hard disk); he had a Sinclair QL before that. Played Prince of Persia for a couple of months. Then wanted to learn i386 assembly and multitasking. A/B threading demo. Terminal emulation, Usenet access from home. Hard disk driver, mistaking hard disk for a modem. More ambition, announced Linux to the world for the first time first ever Linux installation. Upload to ftp.funet.fi, directory name by Ari Lemmke. Originally not free software, licence changed early 1992. First mailing list was created and introduced me to a flood of email (managed with VAX/VMS MAIL and later mush on Unix). I talked a lot with Linus about design at this time, but never really participated in the kernel work (partly because disagreeing with Linus is a high-stress thing). However, I did write the first sprintf for the kernel, since Linus hadn't learnt about varargs functions in C; he then ruined it and added the comment "Wirzenius wrote this portably..." (add google hit count for wirzenius+fucked). During 1992 Linux grew fast, and distros happened, and a lot of packaging and porting of software; porting was easier because Linus was happy to add/change things in the kernel to accomodate software A lot of new users during 1992 as well. End of 1992 I and a few others founded the Linux Documentation Project to help all the new users, some of who didn't come from a Unix background. In fact, things progressed so fast in 1992 that Linus thought he'd release 1.0 very soon, resulting in a silly sequence of version numbers: 0.12, 0.95, 0.96, 0.96b, 0.96c, 0.96c++2. X server ported to Linux; almost immediate prediction of the year of the Linux desktop never happening unless ALL the graphics cards were supported immediately. Linus was of the opinion that you needed one process (not thread) per window in X; I taught him event driven programming. Bug in network code, resulting in ban on uni network. Pranks in the shared office room. We released 1.0 in an event at the CS dept in March, 1994; this included some talks and a ritual compilation of the release version during the event.↧