Re: [9fans] new compilers

[Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ca>]

> 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.)

> 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.)

> and KA9Q as networking

Phil's code had a narrow audience at the time.  I ran both NOS and
early Linux at the time, and settled on NOS because it was more
reliable than the Linux kernels of the day.  The Linux code was also
almost impossible to configure and install at that time.  I ended up
running a mailing list for six months off a PC running NOS.  Ugly,
but it worked.  (But NOS kicked Linux hands down for the radio side
of things, and I was running a couple of high-traffic AX25 gateways
at the time.)

--lyndon