'kazinator on Jan 20, 2016:
Do you remember connecting to the Internet in 1994 or 1995?
In 1993 I was already using Linux, with an actual TCP/IP stack, not
some bolted-on thing. In 1994 I was doing contract work on Linux
already. One of the jobs was for these guys, still chugging along:
http://www.infomine.com/
They employed a group of full-time people who continuously gathered
new information about mining prospecting going on around the world,
stuffing it into a database. This was turned into periodically
refreshed web pages, for which subscribers could "click to pay".
I hacked the CERN httpd to lock the click-to-pay data, and whipped up
a billing system for invoicing customers. (Spat out TeX -> dvi ->
laserjet: most beautiful invoices anyone ever got for anything.) I
made a nice visual control menu for the whole system using a C program
and ncurses, and even Yacc was used on the project for something.
One of the genius programmers on the database side claimed that "OMG,
Linux causes data loss", because when the hundreds of megs of
generated HTML was copied over to the servers (Linux ext2 FS), the
disk usage was way lower than on the FAT. Haha!
In 1995 I got an Asus motherboard with two Pentium 100 processors, and
ran Linux 1.3.x with early SMP support (big kernel lock heavily
used). make -j 3 was only 27% faster than make.'