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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
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I remember, that was a dramatic change.
Also, most people now dont remember this, but YouTube was initially popular because their flash video player was efficient, worked acrossed many different system configurations and browsers and dynamically changed resolution to match your connection.
At that point you had some people with broadband connections and a lot more with dial-up. So often dial-up users would not be able to watch videos because they were only available in one resolution.
YT had 144p (or less!) videos ready for dial-up users and higher resolution videos for broadband users and it automatically picked the appropriate video for the client. This made it so most people (dial-up users) would look to YT first, because you knew that YT would have a video that you could actually watch.
Then Google bought them.
I forget that people still had dial up in mid 2000s, I always associate it with the 90s
YouTube blew up the year I went to college and got access to a T3 line. 🤤 My school had pretty robust security, but it was policy-based. Turns out, if you are on Linux and can't run the middleware, it would just go "oh you must be a printer, c'mon in!"
I crashed the entire network twice, so I fished a computer out of the trash in my parents' neighborhood, put Arch and rtorrrent on it, and would just pipe my traffic via SSH to that machine. :p
Ah, and the short era of iTunes music sharing... Good memories.
Yeah, my high school had a computer lab donated by Cisco to teach their CCNA course. There were like 2 students taking the class and 25 PCs, so we setup one to run WinMX, Kazaa and eDonkey.
They all had CD-RW drives. We were minting music and movie CDs (divx encoded SD movies were under 650MB so they would fit on a CD), and selling them on campus for $3-5. You could get a 100 blank cd-rs for around $40, so it was very profitable.