tensixtyone

At ManLUG on Saturday, Robin Johnson did a presentation on their current project to restore the MCC Interim releases to a working condition using QEMU. The MCC Interim releases present the first distribution that wasn’t dependent on an existing OS, a real milestone in the history of Linux which, until recently, has been lost in the sands of time. Robin, along with John Heaton and a little help from Owen LeBlanc, have managed to recreate 3 releases of MCC Interim which are now available as QEMU images.

Now the question, Why do all of this? These releases represent a real change in the Linux community, after several months of development time Linus released his kernel and MCC Interim was created months afterwards to make installation easier. Essentially, this reduced the required knowledge level from Unix gurus to experts and system administrators. This shift is a notable milestone in Linux’s history which should be preserved, some may write it off as useless but I hope they would understand why it has been done. A further (possibly small) note to add, Linux “genealogy” also shows that MCCI had spin-off distributions, TAMU, MJ, and SLS. SLS morphed over time into the Slackware distribution, a key distribution in the early days of Linux.

The archiving of legacy software is essential, you never know when someone will come across a VAX that needs a OS reinstall, a piece of software that requires a specific version of AIX, or some other issue that would torture a system administrator. Looking away from day to day issues, the software needs to be archived for the prosperity of humanity, understanding the roots of computing which will intertwine more and more with modern life as time goes on. With projects like ManLUGs we can show the next generation how it was “in our day”.