This is from a discussion I am having with someone on another network that, after reading it a few times, I decided might also be appropriate here.

File under "work and tech" memories, some fuzzier than others. ;)

Of the ones I knew, none of them were linux users at that time. They may have migrated to it years later, after deciding that Windows wasn't to their liking.

The timeline is off, I remember in 1994 working with Linux -- at work,

My timeline is probably off from yours because you were encountering it professionally while my encounters were all not at work, so everyone I knew
who knew of linux was a hobbiest. The places I was working 1994-98 were either still running something on top of DOS and Netware (like Wordperfect Office, a Baby-36 emulator, or a Kermit terminal to access a "bigger machine"), were running OS/2 (one client), and a few were either running Windows 3.1 or
WfWG 3.11 (the latter for networking).

Somewhere during 1998-2000, the place I was at upgraded from WfWG to NT 4.0.

My first run in with linux professionally didn't happen until 2006-09 or thereabouts, when I was working with someone to try to get the z/OS side
and the linux side of our mainframe to work together. Something to do with z/OS not supporting a certain flavor of encryption at the time (for ftp transfers) while linux could... or so we thought. While we were working
on it, "the networking people" came up with the policy that all file
transfers had to go through a middle man server based platform because that
was "more secure."

That platform later made the news for getting hacked and leaking all sorts
of information but, luckily, we hosted our own server and didn't use theirs.

I had a tech working for me who'd gotten a copy of SLS linux and we
installed it on a leftover 486. Hardware support was extremely limited,
it took a call to some people at Intel to get support for our
EtherExpress 16 cards (To this day, we're not sure if we were allowed
to have the code and my friend insists that he was responsible for
Intel NIC support in Linux) and it all ended up being a wonderful
project for a team of tech support people - but nothing that Joe User
could manage.

Cool story. Of the top of my head, I cannot remember what type of network
card it was that I figured out worked with little/no pain (IIRC, they maybe were 3COM products?) but, once I figured that out I stocked up on them. ;)

IIRC, whatever it was also worked pretty well with OS/2.

A couple of years later, setting up SLIP on a Linux box was a pain,
and running FVWM and a primitive browser was challenging.

I remember that always being at least somewhat of a pain until I switched over to a cable modem. Can't remember when that was now, maybe 2009? I cannot remember for sure when linux flavored browers seemed to catch up, maybe when Chrome became a thing?

Mike


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