Linux and growth of Internet

[John Foust]

At 03:50 PM 1/13/2005, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
>But my original assertion was that the rapid rise, development and
>adoption of the Internet to the mainstream masses was propelled by Linux.

And how do you propose to show this?  Are there surveys of mom & pop
ISPs circa mid-90s that show they were actually using Linux over
other Unix-like OSes?  For what part of their business?  I don't
think you'll be able to show that.  Because it's going to be much harder
to think Linux had much influence when you look at the sheer number
of Net-capable systems out there.  It would be far easier for me
to proclaim that the rise of Windows 95 and then Windows 98 caused the 
rise of the Internet, from the sheer number of those users who
wanted to use the Net.

Looking back through my online mail archives from 1994 forward, 
I must've been using Linux before 1994, because the earliest message
I had with "Linux" it was a chat with Larry McVoy (now of Bitkeeper),
who was one of the other computer-heads hanging around in the
basement of the CompSci building when I was in college.

I remember working very hard in the late 80s and early 90s to 
get my PCs, Macs and Amigas running NFS and TCP/IP and 'ftp'
so they could talk to each other.  In my software business
in the mid-90s, we relied heavily on a Slackware box as a 
central Samba/NFS file server and 'cvs' repository, as well 
as a parallel Unix development system for debugging an SGI 
version of our product.

- John