V2TXZi

34 CHAPTER 1
primarily by word of mouth (in person or online) at school or work, or perhaps
through one of the early print journals. As one South African developer
now living in the Netherlands recounted during an interview:
It was a friend in that big [college] residence who came along with a
� oppy, and because of his typical, very dramatic personality, he just
put the � oppy in my computer and switched it on, and up came Linux
0.9, and it was the end of 1993 and that was the end for me as well,
or at least the beginning. All these � ashing lines coming by [ . . . ] just
immediately appealed to me.
The “ah- ahhh,” “oh my gosh,” “this is so cool,” “oh my god” factor of discovering
free software depended on a myriad of intersecting elements. For
some hackers, free software meant they could � nally have a workable Unix
operating system for their personal computer (previously, Unix ran primarily
on larger, more expensive machines). Gone were the days of having to
trudge through snowy streets to access a beloved Unix machine in the computer
science department.
Prior to Linux, there were few workable Unix systems that ran on personal
computers and were nonproprietary. The production of Linux thus
represented a general liberation of the Unix architecture, and also inaugurated
its individualization, decentralization, and proliferation. Unhitched
from the sole province of the university, corporation, and stringent rules
of conventional intellectual property law, Linux was released as a public
good and was also produced in public fashion through a volunteer association.
10 Most signi� cantly, hackers were able to run Linux on mass- produced
personal computers at home, spending more quality one- on- one time than
before with an architecture that even now, still demands an active and dedicated
partner. One programmer explained his early excitement as “� nally”
having “a workshop with all the most powerful tools to hack on real stuff at
home.” Most young hackers, however, were thrilled, and many were downright
“� oored,” at the newfound unlimited access to source code.
Yet the real adventure of free software came after its discovery. In the
early days, when Linux distributions were only available off the Net, one
had to download the system from a slow connection, usually a modem— a
technical feat in and of itself. Taking at least a week to accomplish, the
connection would undoubtedly crash, multiple times (but fortunately the
download protocols allowed resuming from where it crashed), and a number
of the � oppies would invariably be corrupt. Once completed, Linux
would often occupy around “forty � oppy disks.” 11 With a stack of � oppies,
some hackers would immediately begin installation, and then had to hack
at the system to make it actually work. Others � rst had to fend off accusations
of piracy from what some developers intimated was some pesky,
ignorant, low- level computer lab administrator. The annoyed but excited
hacker could offer the administrator only an ambiguous defense, because
at this time most hackers lacked the vocabulary with which to describe the