“What part of Linux were you personally interested in and
working on? How are you still involved with Linux development?”
“Bjorn: I already owned my own commercially based UNIX
system (System/V.3 on a Motorola 68k VME), so I definitely wanted
to network my new Linux machine with it. Problem: there was no
space for a network card in the laptop, and PCMCIA had hardly been
invented yet. The only networking potentially available was with a
“dongle” adapter connected to the parallel port.”
“So, I bought a D-Link DE-600. It didn’t have a driver for
Linux, of course, so I built one.”
“I had good help from the Crynwr packet drivers (in assembler
for DOS), released by Russel Nelson, when I tried to understand the
inner workings of the DE-600. Let me tell you that the cycle think,
edit, kernel compile, reboot, test/crash, reboot requires a lot of
patience (and time!) when all you have is a 386SX/25 with just 5MB
of memory! I think I went through that cycle a hundred times, at
least. Most people would call that crazy. I just consider myself
stubborn.”