Meeting Notes: SLUG / 8 Oct / InkScape

[Jon 'maddog' Hall]

>  It wasn't any earlier than 1995, because I was still an undergrad,
>and I didn't begin at UNH until Fall 1995.  I think it was 1996, but
>couldn't swear to it.

I remember that he was really coming to an FSF meeting in Boston, and
that I convinced him to travel to UNH to do a talk there.  It was at
that Boston meeting that I first met Tove, his soon-to-be wife, and we
all went to a Redsox baseball game (Linus' first professional baseball
game).  It was fairly late in the year, since we were wearing jackets.

Rob Lembree and Henry Hall accompanied us to the game.

> Unless Linus came to UNH more than once??

I do not think he went twice.  I do remember that people came from as
far away as upstate New York and Rhode Island to attend the talk.

We were also giving away special CDs to commemorate the Alpha port of
Red Hat.  Red Hat software did not want to give away the Alpha binaries,
since they wanted to sell those, but they did allow us to make Intel
binary copies of the same sources so we could claim the same
functionality, just with Alphabits.  Steve Gaudet of DCG computers had
an Alpha processor there, so he was already selling Alpha processors
running Linux.

I met Linus in May of 1994, signed the loan of products form for the
Alpha in June of 1994, shipped the unit which arrived in July of 1994
(three days before IBM's PowerPC showed up).  Linus was finishing up
a version of the Intel-based kernel and really did not get started until
January of 1995.  Red Hat released a version of the Alpha code on CD in
November of 1995, I believe.

If the Alpha port was not finished until November of 1995, it "had" to
have been at least early 1996 when this occurred.  Probably it was fall
of 1996, which would fit into Ben's attending the meeting as a student
at UNH.

md
-- 
Jon "maddog" Hall
Executive Director           Linux International(R)
email: maddog at li.org         80 Amherst St. 
Voice: +1.603.672.4557       Amherst, N.H. 03031-3032 U.S.A.
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Board Member: Uniforum Association
Board Member Emeritus: USENIX Association (2000-2006)

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