>> Professionals, maybe, but backyard hackers had little reason to care. > > But the pro's had the commercial distributions; I don't think it > really mattered to them. (I had Irix and Solaris (and SCO :-P) at > work. My interest in *BSD was to have something I could experiment > with outside of my day job.) > I guess we are in agreement, Linux and the BSDs were the hackers' options. Minix was, too.
>> Linux had no graphics (nor had the BSDs) > > I don't think that's true. X11 was around and reasonably portable. > (BSDi had it in the alpha and beta releases circa 1993.) > Well, it had X before TCP/IP, which originally was... >> and KA9Q as networking > > Phil's code had a narrow audience at the time. By some measure, sure, but I ran a dial-in Internet access service using a (badly) hacked PPP module in KA9Q. Someone even released a local version of KA9Q as a South African product, in contravention of its licence. Within my circle of Internet "heads", KA9Q was all the rage. And Bdale Garbee (sp?)'s manual.doc is still my recommendation to learn the fundamentals of TCP/IP. Not that anyone has listened to my recommendation :-( Funny, you could download Linux over the 'Net, but you could not connect with it. It took Win'95, in my environment, to popularise the 'Net. I think X was a bit of a toy until TCP/IP became a reality, porting X without TCP/IP deedn't seem any easier than running *BSD without TCP/IP. Possible, but not easy. ++L
