Wow, 20 years.
I still remember the fun I had back in 1992 installing the MCC Interim 0.95c+ on an old 386. The entire distro consisted of two floppy disks – a boot/root disk and a utilities disk.
Unfortunately it did not come with the drivers for my hard disk so I had to compile them myself. This required using my floppy disk as swap space in order to get enough ram to compile a kernel with my driver (no modules in those days!). Took like 12 hours but at the end of it, to my surprise, it booted up and I was presented with a shell!
No networking, except to localhost (lack of drivers) but coming from DOS as I was and having struggled to run a multitasking BBS on DOS/DesqView for so long, I immediately fell in love.
I was in the process of building Ireland On-Line and had been running a BBS under DOS/Desqview. When I saw Linux I realized that *nix was the tool for the job, so switched to what was at the time the only PC Unix I could get – SCO (yeah, I know). However, less than 2 years later, by the time that Linux 1.0 came out, I had completely switched over all our servers to Linux and IOL was the largest ISP in the country.
I reckon we were one of the very first commercial companies to build their entire infrastructure on Linux.
Best move I ever made 🙂
Thanks Linus.