[svlug] historic kernel restoration (was: organizing the event) (fwd)

[Ian Kluft]

I neglected to to a group reply on this and accidentally sent it only to Karl.

>>From: "Karl F. Larsen" <k5di at zianet.com>
>>	If anyone has that first kernel and an old but good 88386 puter
>>you could hook it to a big monitor at the BBQ and play with it. The new
>>stuff written in the past 10 years is sure nice.
>
>Go ahead, Karl.  You have it.  Almost every Linux kernel release is still
>up on kernel.org.  And 0.01 was preserved there.
>   http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.01
>   http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/linux-0.01.tar.gz
>
>However, before you try that, beware that you may have your work cut out
>for you.  Early Linux kernels (pre-0.95) were a lot more difficult to
>install and configure.  You'd probably need to boot from a floppy, for
>example.  Even today's smallest hard drive may be too large for it.  And
>LILO wasn't available for the first kernels.  And you have to use the Minix
>filesystem because there was no EXT2 until about a year and a half later.
>
>And it didn't run very much.  Linus released it with only enough system
>calls to run gcc.  Other people contributed more system calls and
>capabilities from there.
>
>There were no distributions back then either.  You had to download all your
>programs from GNU or comp.sources.misc archives.  And you had to do that by
>FTP since there was no web yet.  (Well, the HTTP protocol had just been
>invented but the first graphical web browser was still 2 years away.)  To be
>authentic, you would have to try to locate programs which were available 10
>years ago.  Not all of them are as well archived as the kernel.
>
>Besides, at a BBQ in a park, maybe we don't need an old 386 desktop
>sitting around.
>-- 
>Ian Kluft  KO6YQ   PP-ASEL                              sbay.org coordinator
>ikluft(at)thunder.sbay.org   http://www.kluft.com/~ikluft/      San Jose, CA
>       "Carelessness and overconfidence are usually more dangerous
>       than deliberately accepted risks."   -- Wilbur Wright, 1901