WHO WE ARE

This issue we asked our experts: Linux Format is 20 years old! What were you doing 20 years ago?

Jonni Bidwell

I was preparing for second-year exams in a bleak coastal town in Fife. I believe graph theory, combinatorics, vector calculus and Fourier analysis were things I was supposed to know about. Three years later, I started using Linux as my daily OS. And look at where that got me.

Nick Peers

Two decades ago – a whole other life now – I was in my first editor’s role at this very publishing stable, on the short-lived Quick &

Easy Windows. Luckily for me, I went on to better things – two years editing PC Answers, which is where I encountered Linux properly for the first time.

Les Pounder

20 years ago I remember downloading Mandrake Linux on my 512KB cable internet. It took ages to download all the CDS, and then after writing the CDS I discovered that one of the downloaded images was corrupt. But I did manage to install Mandrake on my 333MHZ AMD PC!

Mayank Sharma

Wow, that’s a long time! The constant anxiety about high school grades aside, I remember the excitement about the International Space Station getting its first inhabitants around that time, and seeing a trailer for the first of The Fast & The Furious films during a screening of Shrek.

Alexander Tolstoy

As a teenager, I remember how foreign students coming from Europe and the US were amazed to see that everyone in St. Petersburg had Windows and Photoshop as a must have-bundle on their PCS. “Wow, you must be very rich!” they said (naïve law-compliant folks…)