Around the early to mid-1990s, if you had heard of a new Unix-like operating system for your personal computer, it wasn’t a trivial matter to try it. You had to find a source and probably get CD-ROMs sent to you in the mail (you could get in on floppy disks instead, but it needed at least 70 of them). Then you would usually have to figure out how to compile the OS with all the correct configurations for your hardware. After that came the process of figuring out how to install it.
The whole process could take a week or more, not counting shipping. And what you got, in those days, was a text-based system with a command-line interface. There were some early window managers available already, but they weren’t all that useful. But you had a reasonable facsimile of Unix, which otherwise required you to have an extremely expensive workstation from the likes of Sun, HP, or if you were both very cool and very wealthy, Silicon Graphics.
But the distributions were the thing. There was (and still is) more than one Linux distribution, and each one came to have its own “personality.” Around 1994 there weren’t many choices, and one of the best ones was Slackware, created by Patrick Volkerding, who on his birthday in 1994 (on October 20) was just 28. Slackware’s “personality” is that it lacks a lot of the add-on software other distributions include, and users find it more similar to the original design of Unix.
In addition to being a software developer and project leader, Volkerding is a Grateful Dead fan who had been to 75 concerts by the early 90s. And he participates (or did at the time) in the Church of the SubGenius — which is why his Linux distribution is called “Slackware.” The SubGenius himself is a fictional salesman named J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, who embodies something called “Slack.” Which is never explained, although you can increase your personal supply of whatever it is by avoiding doing any work. The Church of the SubGenius, if you don’t already know, is parody. But back to Volkerding.
Slackware has always been free, although you had to pay for postage and the CD-ROMs. But Volkerding loves beer and brews his own, and back in the day if you appreciated Slackware, you’d send him a bottle of beer from a local brewery.
Both Slackware and Patrick Volkerding are still around (he turns 56 today) and nowadays you can download it and install it quite easily. It’s the basis of a number of other Linux distributions, and by now the window managers are much improved. And you can still send him a beer if you want.
