As Linux recently had its 20th birthday, perhaps now is a good time to take a trip down memory lane…

My first memory of Linux was when I was about 12. My 486 wasn’t fast enough to play MP3s in Windows. Previously, if I wanted to listen to a song, I would convert it to a WAV on our family Pentium 75, split it into 1.4MB chunks and copy it via ~15 floppy disks onto my PC.
I installed RedHat 5 (from a PC mag CD). RedHat came with a commandline MP3 player (called mpg123) that would decode and play MP3s on my 486. This meant it only took 2 or 3 floppy disks to copy a MP3 I’d downloaded from our family PC’s 14.4kb/s net connection.
Today, my phone runs Linux (Maemo), my work PC runs Linux (Ubuntu), my laptop & our TV run Linux (Ubuntu), our router & NAS run Linux (some kind of Debian). Our next car is likely to run Linux and so might our fridge. Thanks Linus!