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"Free", until mid 90s I guess most people bought Linux distros on CDs, later DVD (no downloads). For me the big, big plus on Linux (vs. Dos / Windows), had been all the free compilers.

by flyinghamster1 hours ago|

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I'd have to say that gcc is the unsung hero of FOSS. If you wanted compilers on your shiny new commercial-UNIX box, you either had to fork out $$$ or find a way to get the GNU toolchain into place. Even on PCs compilers tended to cost a lot, with Borland being a shining exception.

Somewhere, I still have a Red Hat 5 retail CD. I'm not sure, but I might have bought it at Borders Books rather than a computer shop. I know I bought a few CD-ROM collections at the bookstore.

by SoftTalker23 minutes ago|

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Linux books that included a CD-ROM with the subject distro and software were pretty common in that era.

by ch_sm4 hours ago|

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to be fair, nobody in 1990 decided between NeXT and Linux, because (A) Linux didn’t exist yet and (B) they were / would have been completely different markets and totally different capabilities.

by SoftTalker4 hours ago|

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True. I think linux maybe had just been released but there was nothing like a "distro" that was easy to install.

Minix existed at the time too, I know because I ran it on an 8088 PC.

But within a few years, linux started gaining mindshare and was starting to replace proprietary unix especially on individual PCs.

by saltcured4 hours ago|

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You're off by a year or two at best. Linus announced his kernel project on the Minix usenet group in Aug 1991.

It wasn't until mid 1992 that distros started to exist, and I'd say it took a bit of time for those to be complete enough to be usable for someone with a goal other than smoke-testing the kernel on their PC.

I can say for certain that I, a complete newbie, was able to boot SLS Linux floppies in early 1993, and within a couple months I was installing Slackware to HDD.

by BirAdam3 hours ago|

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Yeah, 1993 is when things really took off. First SLS, then Slackware, and using Slackware as the build environment: Debian.

You also had SuSE, which really started as German-localized Slackware.