According to this KernelTrap article, the 0.11 Linux kernel was released on December 8th, 1991. Among the ‘features’ advertised in that release, Linus noted that the console was now capable of producing beeps, Linux gained native mkfs, fsck and fdisk utilities, and the com ports finally had adjustable line speeds. However, if you managed to get Linux booted you were immediately dropped into a root bash shell as Linux lacked a login system. It also lacked support for SCSI devices, and support for swapping to disk meaning it required at least 4MB of RAM to be useful.
Ahh the good old days. This is when I got in on the fun.
The previous summer I had bought a 386-25 with the money I’d made. Played a bunch with DOS, installed some “borrowed” version of windows 2 (I think). I don’t remember who steered me to linux, but I ran it mostly at that point.
One of the first most useable applications on Linux was their prolog interpreter. I moved into a house with a guy and we ran a null modem cable, he logged into my box from his and did his prolog homework (I think that was in Feb/March of ’92)
Edited 2007-09-14 15:27 UTC
Windows 2 first hit the streets in 1987 so either you had a really old copy or you most likely ran windows 3 or 3.1.
“It also lacked support for SCSI devices, and support for swapping to disk meaning it required at least 4MB of RAM to be useful.”
Hehe, Useful
That is indeed humorous, as a lot of people for a long time have said, “Linux doesn’t require much hardware to run and be useful!” while at that time, that was actually a rather large amount of RAM for a PC, and Windows applications in Windows 3.0 were practically swimming in those resources (Windows 3.1 came out in 92, IIRC) since as of that time, well, there weren’t too many heavy-duty memory using Windows applications, since there weren’t MP3 files being used and collected, the GUI of the system was fairly light and limited for fanciness.
Heck, I remember making Microsoft Office (on an old work machine) of the time run in a rather responsive manner on a 2 Meg 386 system with a 40 meg hard drive several years later. Swapfile was a very useful thing
Reminds me of my first IBM-compatible computer. It was a graduation present in 1995: A Texas Instruments TI-4000M laptop with Windows for Workgroups 3.11/DOS 6.22 and 4MB RAM. There was no optical drive, only a floppy, and the HDD was 200MB. I hadn’t heard of Linux at that time, though I knew a tiny bit about UNIX as some variant of it was our school’s server OS.
It still amazes me to this day thinking of all the things I did with that little box; audio editing, MIDI sequencing, even a few nice games once I added an external SCSI CD-ROM drive.
comparing linux with rather simple systems like win 3.1, amiga os or system 6 isn’t very fair.
if you look at os/2, win nt, nextstep etc., they all need at least 8mb or more (win nt) to be usefull. okay, they also all offer a gui and a loginsystem.
For a second there I thought the title was “Theo .11 Linux Kernal” and I was just wondering what in the world was going on.
>It also lacked support for SCSI devices, and support for swapping to disk meaning it required at least 4MB of RAM to be useful.
AmigaOS didn’t need 4MB to be usefull, and it lacked swapping, among a lot of other things…
Comparing AmigaOS with win3/system6 is stupid as well.
No, I’m comparing Linux 0.11 with AOS v3.1 of 93…
It just seems that from the start, Linux was already eating lots of memory… no need to wonder why it has become such a beast… That’s the only thing I meant.