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Linux during the mid to late 90s (Windows 95 and 98 era)
(lemmy.world)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
I remember buying a bunch of old HP ISA 100Mbit NICs to turn an old computer into a router/server combo. Naive as I was I put them all in and nothing worked. Turns out they were all configured to use the same IRQ (since they likely came from independent machines), and that caused them to overwrite each others settings... including the MAC adress. Thankfully I found some nice hacker that worked with these cards before and published a little C tool to rewrite their EEPROMs. I contacted him if he sees a chance to resurrect the cards and that saint indeed hacked the necessary features into his tool so I could rewrite the MAC adresses, change the IRQ one by one and ended up with a working network. Good times.