It is still downloading but there is ‘enough’ here now to make it somewhat worthwhile, and announcable…
http://oldlinux.superglobalmegacorp.com/Linux.old/
I guess just because someone else saved something from the olde bit bucket in the sky doesn’t mean you should take a copy as well as it could all easily disappear.
Can you point at the the occasion when Linus decided he wanted to focus on the Kernel and let the community do the user space? Was it in 1991 or 1992? Was it a conscious decision of Linus or were distro born regardless?
It was very early on.. The best we users got was a boot/root diskette.. Back in the 0.10 / 0.11 days you pretty much needed a Minix installation to really use it (partitioning & formatting was all done on Minix, not to mention transferring files) and I only had access to the Minix demo diskette which.. wasn’t terribly useful.
I got the impression that Linus wanted someone else to pick up on the packaging as he wanted to do kernel stuff, not a ‘world’. And of course the only free ‘world’ stuff was GNU.. Back then things were very haphazard, and you pretty much built whatever you were going to use from source. Which was a big change for those of us used to binary only.
The real hell was the change from a.out to elf.
Good call on the mirror. I always start mirroring too late as well 🙂 One morning I found (before the sad date) that Lucent was rearranging people’s website, so dmr’s wasn’t there. Actually smacked myself to the head a couple of times, calling myself stupid (I don’t do that that often).