How the Mac was born... supposedly...

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005, Tom Jennings wrote:

> > cheap.  I think that was probably a big part of the initial attraction to
> > Linux: a Unix box of your own.
>
> It didn't take much hardware to run a real unix in 1994, even:
>
> http://wps.com/archives/wps.com.11Apr1994/wps-hardware.html

<...>

> It was stuff like *this* and not linux that made the early internet
> explode. No fault of linux, it simply wasn't around then.

Hi Tom.

Are you saying that Linux wasn't around in 1994?

> (Ugh, and I had an UNLIMITED BSD/I site license, for which paid
> like $100 (seriously), from the "factory", talk about deals of the
> century. Around 1995?  It got sold with the rest of the assets of
> tlg.net. I gave the original BSD/I box away a few years back to a
> collector friend. I was storing glue in it (it once was just an
> old box :-))

That's another part of the point: Linux was free.  No site license
required.  And it worked.  Sure, even if most people could get an
unlimited BSD site license for the cheap price of $100, that was still a
barrier to wide mainstream adoption of Unix as a PC platform, considering
DOS was effectively free and it could do a lot of what you wanted.
Certainly not as much as a Unix system, let alone BSD/I, but the other
thing to keep in mind was that just KNOWING that a cheapish BSD license
was available was not widely known.  Only those in certain college and
university CS circles might have known that.  I certainly don't recall
knowing that you could get a BSD license in the little community college
where I took some CS courses.  As far as I knew, SCO was the shit if you
wanted Unix on a PC (circa 1990-1991).  This all changed when Linux came
out.  It seemed like EVERYONE found out about it as it quite literally
took the hacker community by storm and spread quickly and widely.

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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