Mon 3 Jul 2006
Is That The Time Already?
Posted at 12:23 +1000
[Warning: relatively old guy reminiscing. Anybody under 25 should just move along.]
My friend John periodically points to other writing he has done that is published elsewhere (in his day job as the Greatest Science Journalist In All Of New Mexico, he writes for a living and his blog is not his only outlet). Recently, he pointed to two older contributions he made to the GNOME community: one on Open Source leadership and one about somewhat arbitrary style choices in technical writing.
On both occasions, I caught myself thinking "I remember that; those were interesting times". A recent post by Luis Villa about the World Cup (this post ) reminded me that the last time the World Cup was on, we were just about to release GNOME 2.0 and the IRC channels and mailing lists were very active with everybody fixing last minute bugs, writing documentation, etc. I could clearly remember spending a weekend in at my workplace at the time working out a fool-proof build order so that John could put it in the release notes. Seems like forever ago, but it was only four years.
This morning it happened again. Looking for something totally unrelated and fumbling around inarticulately on Google, I stumbled across the online Changelog for expect. Scroll down to July 6, 1996 and there is one of my earliest documented contributions to Open Source. Prior to that I had, I think, sent in some build patches and one possible memory leak report to the Pari/GP project, which I was using in some post-graduate study I was doing at the time. Expect was useful in the same situation: I could use it to script the running of some very long searches I was doing on a number theory problem.
The thing is, it all seems so recent. I can clearly recollect spending a morning trying to build expect on my home Linux box. Discovering some problems (the 2.0 Linux kernel was reasonably new at the time, so this wasn't unexpected in hindsight) and working out how to patch the autoconf script to make things work. I also sent Don Libes, the maintainer, a couple of documentation fixes. Maybe six hours later, back came a grateful email and my patches went in (I don't remember the Pari fixes being quite so quickly acknowledged). But this was ten years ago this week. Where has the time gone?
By comparison, the period from early 1993, when I first started using Linux until, say, mid-1996 when I was relying on Linux for the bulk of my computing work at home, seems much longer.
I can remember struggling for a couple of weeks to get Linux working initially, around March 1993; according to one email summary, kernel 0.99.6 was March 1993 and 0.99.7 was the following month. Version 0.99.6 sounds very familiar, so I'm going to claim that as my first Linux kernel. I may be out by six weeks or so, but it was around that period and I remember regularly updating throughout the never-ending 0.99 series of kernels in 1993 and early 1994. Just getting a good copy of each of the floppy disks home from the university was a challenge. Everybody getting started on Linux at that time has similar stories: you would make copies of the two (initially) or three or four or seven disks you needed; haul them home; discover that disk two didn't work; copy it again the next day; remember to haul it home; get as far as disk five this time; rinse, wash, repeat...
By the time 1996 came around, Linux was a relative breeze. You could get reasonably cheap CD readers and buy archives from Walnut Creek. Slackware was pretty straightforward to install (it was good from day one, but it had become huge and useful over the years). Slightly smaller user base meant that not all packages ran without some modifications, which led to things like the expect story, above.
Lots of water under the bridge in the meantime. Lots of lessons learnt, many no doubt forgotten. I am by no means a long-time user or contributor of Free Software or Open Source, but in these days where I am regularly interacting with people who were still in Primary School (or, in some cases, diapers) when Linux first hit the FTP sites, I have to be amazed sometimes at how far things have come; and how fast.