[ILUG] Linux History Project

[Mike Knell]

Folks,

I thought I'd float this here as it's a good place to find a pile of
Linux users..

I've had a comment on my home page for about the last three years that
I really should get around to starting a Linux History Project. And
in a new surge of enthusiasm, I've decided to try and get it off the
ground. This was initially sparked by trying to get hold, for the sake
of nostalgia, of a copy of SLS 1.03 - the first Linux distribution I
played with [1], back in the dark early months of 1993. It proved, well,
impossible, as all the archives I checked had obviously either updated
editions or none at all, as it's been obsolete for, well, the computing
equivalent of a century. The closest I was able to find was a much later
release of SLS, with a frankly new-fangled 1.0 kernel.

This was, I thought, a shame - the Old Stuff should be kept available
for historical interest. It's proven hard to find the stuff, too, the
times I've tried - asking for old CDs hasn't helped much as most people
quite naturally ditch the old stuff when the new stuff comes out.

So, I'd like to start a little archive of Old Linux Stuff - old 
distributions, list archives, and possibly a bit of documentation on
the history of the thing as there seem to be several conflicting 
versions around of the genesis of Linux (nearly as many as there are of
the origins of the Internet) - draw up a proper annotated history as a
result of speaking to people who were actually there...

Of course, some of this would be duplicated (old kernels, for instance,
are very easily available from the kernel archives), but it'd still be
nice to bring all the stuff together in one place as a source for
reference.

Would anyone be interested in such a thing? If so, I'll get started on
a few ideas. I'd be even more interested to know if there are other
similiar projects already - web searches haven't shown up much, apart
from a few short "history of Linux" pages...

Whaddyathink?

Mike

[1] And which gave me a lot of help in the process of failing my
    degree, for that matter. Ahem.

-- 
Computer Science System Administrator, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
       mike.knell at cs.tcd.ie -=- http://www.cs.tcd.ie/Mike.Knell/