Coreix Insight

Operating Systems 25 Years On

The fondest memories I have of IT relate to installing Linux and *BSD in the 1990’s. Everything was just different back then, Windows 3.1 came on six 1.44MB floppy discs, Windows NT 3.1 came on twenty-two, and Red Hat Linux was in its infancy. My parents had replaced the old 486 with a new Intel Pentium 75 and we had Windows 95 on CD that featured a Weezer video of “Buddy Holly”. Nevertheless, installing Linux was always a battle, the 1.x series kernels were challenging, but things changed with the release of 2.0.x kernel series and battles often related more to XFree86 or LILO or trying to re-compile a kernel with additional modules – All challenges I relished at the time. Red Hat Linux was always a prominent figure in the Linux community. The 2.4.x series really pushed Linux forward for the community despite the controversy regarding some of their decisions at the time that led to flame wars the likes mere mortals from this century can only imagine. I certainly found my love for computer architecture and software engineering by experimenting and developing under *BSD and Linux all those years ago.