Spyke

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It's New To Me Is All That Matters

Many years ago, I was with some fellow volunteers outside a popular shopping mall, raising money for a new ambulance. There were many people who could have obviously been able to spare a bill or two, but they were too full of themselves to even look at our faces, let alone the fliers we were handing out.

Then one old guy with a bottle of beer in one hand and dressed like that was his only dinner came out of the shop, looked at us, and put his beer change in our bucket, saying something along the lines of "you do something important".

Made our day.

linux

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Linux during the mid to late 90s (Windows 95 and 98 era)

It was a struggle. You went to buy some device and you had to check it was not one of those windows-only ones. Modems were particularly bad, for example.

You had to read the how-tos and figure things out. Mailing lists and newsgroups were the only places to find some help.

You had to find the shop willing to honour warranty on the parts and not on the whole system, as they had no knowledge of Linux at all. But once you found them, you were a recurring customer so they were actually happy. You might even have ended up showing them memtest86!

You would still be able to configure the kernel and be able to actually know some of those names, compilation would take several hours but it was a learning experience.

You could interact with very helpful kernel developers and get fixes to test.

You could have been the laughing stock of your circles of friends, but within you, you knew who'd have had the last laugh.

And yes, Loki games had some titles working on Linux natively, Railroad Tycoon was one. Too bad they were ahead of the times and didn't last much.