I remember when /bin/sh was the default shell, when you had to build grep from source. LILO was our bootloader. Dmesg was our seer. We made fire from a friction drill. Knapped our own blades from flint.
I was there when the dark magic was written. In the time before git. The shell had not yet been born again.
The great wizard Stahlman still held sway in the high court, his Gknights of Gnu were just building their kernel. Lo gaze upon their mighty works and see they lie in ruin.
Torvalds was the true vanguard, he lead us to build the mighty kernel, to reverse engineer the binary blobs, coax the meaning from machine code, a thin line from serial to stdout.
No heirarchy but those inherited from the libraries. User space was our land, ~ was our home, #! was our flag. No gods, no masters, only code.
'94 but I was on Usenet (actually probably not usenet but definitely one of the “readers”) when I heard about it first. That would’ve been around '93. Me and a buddy were pretty nerdy and his dad worked at Bell Labs and they got a couple floppies. That was my start. It was just the kernel and Gnu Utilities. Literally Linux+Gnu. Shortly after that I grabbed SLS Linux, that became Slack. Then Debian, I was in the listserve when Ian would still answer questions and fix bugs. I hope he’s found the peace now he was searching for in life.
I’ve contributed to quite a few open source projects over the years, nothing foundational. I didn’t really know anybody from the old old days. Just a geeky kid lucky enough to have a computer and a modem at the time. I am very privileged to have grown up when I did and where I did.
I don’t envy the kids coming up now. Completely abstracted away from their systems to the point where they actually think it’s magic. I had a very junior engineer ask me how to print a pdf the other week at work. I can’t imagine how modern education and tech have failed them. I hope I’m wrong but it feels like LLMs are talking away curiosity and hacking. I’m sure that’s just me being a crusty old bastard though.
Speaking of I’ve been having fun playing around with this as of late.
You’d need to have access to the prompt tooling, or worse yet the RAG, otherwise you’re just hoping that a user feeds your email into an LLM. The hidden ascii though, old tricks are new again.
Lol! I thought vi was genuinely a new layer of the OS, like an embedded console. Ended up creating 10 files containing exit, or quit, or ^c, until I hit the escape key and the cursor changed…then I rebooted from frustration and actually read the man page. The controls are all from this dumb terminal keyboard that had useful decals on them. That’s where navigation with kjhl came from and :q to quit.
I dearly miss lilo, it was the best bootloader. But then everyone started using grub which I hated with a passion. So glad that there are so much better options nowadays.
Honestly, I’m still worried about getting pilloried for this.
Systemd-boot on BTRFS with snapshotting is awesome. Bonus points if your system is entirely in initrd.
I still remember the old times before xorg.confs were modular. The truly hard times.
I remember when /bin/sh was the default shell, when you had to build grep from source. LILO was our bootloader. Dmesg was our seer. We made fire from a friction drill. Knapped our own blades from flint.
Simpler times.
… I don’t remember building grep, nor do I remember a time before bash.
Are… Are you God?
I was there when the dark magic was written. In the time before git. The shell had not yet been born again.
The great wizard Stahlman still held sway in the high court, his Gknights of Gnu were just building their kernel. Lo gaze upon their mighty works and see they lie in ruin.
Torvalds was the true vanguard, he lead us to build the mighty kernel, to reverse engineer the binary blobs, coax the meaning from machine code, a thin line from serial to stdout.
No heirarchy but those inherited from the libraries. User space was our land, ~ was our home, #! was our flag. No gods, no masters, only code.
Genuinely curious. When was your first time touching Linux/GNU?
'94 but I was on Usenet (actually probably not usenet but definitely one of the “readers”) when I heard about it first. That would’ve been around '93. Me and a buddy were pretty nerdy and his dad worked at Bell Labs and they got a couple floppies. That was my start. It was just the kernel and Gnu Utilities. Literally Linux+Gnu. Shortly after that I grabbed SLS Linux, that became Slack. Then Debian, I was in the listserve when Ian would still answer questions and fix bugs. I hope he’s found the peace now he was searching for in life.
I’ve contributed to quite a few open source projects over the years, nothing foundational. I didn’t really know anybody from the old old days. Just a geeky kid lucky enough to have a computer and a modem at the time. I am very privileged to have grown up when I did and where I did.
I don’t envy the kids coming up now. Completely abstracted away from their systems to the point where they actually think it’s magic. I had a very junior engineer ask me how to print a pdf the other week at work. I can’t imagine how modern education and tech have failed them. I hope I’m wrong but it feels like LLMs are talking away curiosity and hacking. I’m sure that’s just me being a crusty old bastard though.
Speaking of I’ve been having fun playing around with this as of late.
https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2024/m365-copilot-prompt-injection-tool-invocation-and-data-exfil-using-ascii-smuggling/
You’d need to have access to the prompt tooling, or worse yet the RAG, otherwise you’re just hoping that a user feeds your email into an LLM. The hidden ascii though, old tricks are new again.
I’m close, 93 also I think, slack on a 386.
Got stuck in vi, had to reboot.
Remember thinking how awesome 6 virtual consoles were. I think my tmux addiction came from there.
Lol! I thought vi was genuinely a new layer of the OS, like an embedded console. Ended up creating 10 files containing exit, or quit, or ^c, until I hit the escape key and the cursor changed…then I rebooted from frustration and actually read the man page. The controls are all from this dumb terminal keyboard that had useful decals on them. That’s where navigation with kjhl came from and :q to quit.
https://pikuma.com/blog/origins-of-vim-text-editor
Rage quitting vi/vim really is a right of passage.
Remember ed?
https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html
Do you remember…
When someone first showed you tab completion?
Like absolute fucking wizardry man, like a Jedi Master appeared in front of you with the knowledge of the ancients.
Before that instant in your life you were typing out full pathnames, like some fucking schmuck.
And from then on, everything changed, forever.
I dearly miss lilo, it was the best bootloader. But then everyone started using grub which I hated with a passion. So glad that there are so much better options nowadays.
Honestly, I’m still worried about getting pilloried for this. Systemd-boot on BTRFS with snapshotting is awesome. Bonus points if your system is entirely in initrd.
https://github.com/uszie/systemd-boot-snapshots
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/initrd.html
I was there, Gandalf, I was there when the modelines of xf86config failed…