This is going to be long and rambling. If you’re going to read it, you may want to wait until you’re ill, and can’t get out of bed, and your head is filled with cotton, and you’re eating painkillers like they were candy. I don’t want you to feel pain while reading. Being unconscious and having a speech synthesizer read it to you at high speed is an even better option.

Linux is 20 years old this year. That’s a long time. Since I was there from the beginning I thought I’d share some memories of what’s happened.

In 1988 I graduated from high school, and got accepted into the University of Helsinki to study computer science. The studies started in September, and also in September I got invited to join Spektrum, the Swedish speaking club for those studying math, physics, chemistry, geography, or computer science.

Spektrum is a social club, which was good, since I was, and remain, shy and socially awkward, and the club provided me with a way to easily meet people when I’d moved into a new city. That’s also where I met the only other Swedish speaking new CS student of that year, a guy named Linus Torvalds.

That first year, we took some of the same classes, since all new students took those classes, and we met at Spektrum as well. A sort of friendship grew.

Computers were quite expensive back then, and the university provided access to classrooms full of PCs running MS-DOS, plus a few Macs, and some terminals connected to a big VAX/VMS system. I never liked MS-DOS that much, and they were often all in use. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the couple of Macs I tried, never having seen a GUI before. Thus I naturally graduated to the terminals, even though VAX/VMS was a horrible system to use, I thought.

After Christmas, things changed a bit. The CS department had a small Ultrix computer hidden away, mostly unused, and I happened to get access to that. Ultrix was DEC’s version of Unix. I had read about Unix, particulary in the K&R C book, and liked what I’d read. I had even written a few MS-DOS command line tools that worked like similar Unix tools. It was a joy to get access to a real Unix computer: pipes worked in real time, not via temporary files! Multiple processes at the same time! Filenames weren’t unnaturally constricted! It was quite liberating.

While playing around with the Ultrix box, which I think was called kreeta (Finnish for Crete, the island), one day I accidentally typoed the “rm” command. I had previously developed a habit of typoing “em”, which was the local version of MicroEMACS, as “rm”, so I tried very hard not to typo commands. However, that day, I typoed “rm something” as “rn something”, and discovered Usenet. Continue reading “Linux at 20, some personal memories” »