Harry Putnam wrote: > Dirk Heinrichs <dirk.heinri...@online.de> writes: > > >> Hmm, "Not commonly used", don't know. First versions of autofs date back to >> April 97, amd is much older, I think. So no, automounting is NOT new in >> Linux, >> it's there for over a decade now. >> > > At nearly 70, I can call a decade `fairly recent'. >
Quite honestly, your age is irrelevant in this context. > Linux is much older than 1997... Not at all. Linus made his first announcement in August 1991. The first files appeared on the Internet in September 1991. It wasn't an operating system at that point. > The newbies like me were definitely not using it.... linux then took much > more config than it does today... even on gentoo today. You could easily > spend 2 or more wks getting X up... or even getting it to boot. > Hmm. Most of the people who used (actually, played with because it wasn't a usable operating system until much later) Linux in the early days came from Minix. Remember that? Newbies to Linux were not newbies to computers and operating systems. Far from it, most were pretty adept DOS hackers. > Building your own kernel was well out of the grasp of newbies at that > time. > Definitely not. > So in that atmosphere... its not true that automount was in common use. You seem to have entirely forgotten what Linux actually was in the 1990s. It was actually a hacker's paradise. There were NO newbies in the sense of people who were new to computers using Linux. The very nature of Linux users in those days was that they were experimental, had some (if not considerable) knowledge and were keen to try any new gizmo that came along and, if there wasn't one, develop their own. Indeed, that's exactly how and why Linux is where it is now. FWIW, I have been involved with computers one way or another since 1969 (a few months before Man set foot upon the moon). Be lucky, Neil http://www.neiljw.com
