great story, for me another interesting part is that lots of those tools/utils used in their dev work were copied from that dude's home, surely that is very reproducible & auditable.
We're talking early '90s here. Security was a thing of course, it meant you set a five-character root password on your FTP server ;-). MD5 wasn't even around so you had to trust that your source tarballs were not tampered with whatever the origins.
So whether I brought them from home or that company (if it had internet at all...) pulled them from gnu.org probably wouldn't have made a material difference. It was one of the reasons there was a big antipathy towards free software, at least with the vendor tapes you had someone to sue if they got tampered with.
There is a slight risk with auditability, but were it me in the mid 90s I'd be honoured to hire someone who is excited enough to keep source copies of the GNU coreutils at home.
Someone who is eager and creative like that is unlikely to be a sociopathic jobsworth. I.e. the type most likely to steal secretes or undermine your business.
In 1995/96 I was the first tech employee at a startup. We had a Solaris server at the core of our network, and needed a C compiler.
Paying Sun whatever stupid amount of money they wanted didn’t seem to make sense, GNU still didn’t have their own domain, and for whatever reason I couldn’t find a gcc binary for Solaris to download (probably related to the terrible state of web search engines at the time). So I visited my university sysadmin and copied gcc from his Solaris network to use to compile our own fresh copy.
It’s sometimes hard to remember just how bad things used to be.
Mine was on a couple of dozen floppies from a BBS.
Downloading them over my 28.8kbps modem was so expensive and tedious and unreliable that I put my PC in the car, along with a stack of floppies and the 15" CRT monitor, mouse, and IBM Model M keyboard, drove six hours to the opposite side of the country, to where my friend who ran the BBS lived.
We spent the weekend copying floppies and installing very early Slackware on a couple of machines.
Thanks for confirming that my option of asking a local admin with internet access was the right way.
Still... had to load the tape on our office AIX machine (the only Unix box I had access to), then wire up a null modem cable to a PC, install Kermit on both ends, transfer all the floppy images, find an MS-DOS image writer, and finally copy the works on that stack of floppies.
Yes, good times! I have the experience of copying games on multiple floppies; though it might be seen as an inconvenience tech-wise, it had other things which was fun. Travelling to a friend's place, yapping while it was getting copied. Cutting the archive into pieces and joining them back was a small personal learning exercise, and more. Thanks for the story!
