Prompted by a news item that #GNU #Guix now supports 64-bit Hurd, I went back and checked the debian-hurd mailing list archives—it looks like it was about a month shy of 22 years ago that I got #Debian GNU/Hurd installed on some spare hardware.

[carson@social.chittom.family]

Prompted by a news item that #GNU #Guix now supports 64-bit Hurd, I went back and checked the debian-hurd mailing list archives—it looks like it was about a month shy of 22 years ago that I got #Debian GNU/Hurd installed on some spare hardware. (This is the only documentation I checked, anything below is from memory, so the timeline/details may be wrong. Forgive me.)

At the time, the installation guide was a 10–15 page document of a series of commands that had to be typed in correctly, and which it was recommended to print out so that you'd have them in front of you; unfortunately, there was a "bug" in the document: if you printed it out, at least one very important command was too long for the page and got truncated. (This one bit me, but the mailing list set me right fairly quickly.) I installed it partly out of a whim to run a system that was as purely "GNU" as I could make it, and partly because my other project, a eBay-acquired Sun #SparcStation 5, was on hold while I waited for delivery of a Sun keyboard.

The thing that I remember most about the Hurd was that while it was mostly—as expected—Unix-like, you could also login as guest without a password and do some things. I thought this was very strange at the time, but having learned more since then about the history of computing, I now realize that it's very much in the vein of older systems and the culture surrounding them. The culture of communities around computer systems (both OSs and hardware) and software is still around—witness @stefano's efforts with bsd.cafe and illumos.cafe for a great example—but I think what's gone away, or at least become greatly attenuated, over the decades is the experience of community around literally using those systems.

I am, just, old enough to remember telnetting into the university mailserver (which ran #IRIX for some reason I can't fathom) both to check my mail and to run who to see who was around to talk to. Everything was local. In that sort of environment—to which GNU's history is heir—it absolutely makes sense to me to have a guest user: because I might have a guest, who, I don't know, wants to play nethack or something. That sort of shared use by a local community was already on the decline when I experienced it, and it quickly became less and less of the norm to the point it's now mostly nonexistent, at least statistically; but as I've noted elsewhere, we still see the relics of it in software and systems like vestigial appendices—has literally anyone ever actually used the talkd(8)/talk(1) that still comes installed (or is at least available) in 2026 with Unix-like systems, not excluding macOS?

Don't misunderstand me: I'm not complaining or being grumpy! Things change, the world changes, the way we interact with the world changes. That's life. If I have any point at all, it's that the sort of intentional communities we make on the internet are even more important when the default interaction is no longer with someone we might bump into on the way to class or work, or can easily buy a cup of coffee. Just remember that behind every post or chat message is a real person, with a family, with friends, with hopes and dreams—and yes, faults to deal with and forgive, just like us (just like me, for sure).

Not what I expected to write when I started out with the Hurd, but take it for what it's worth.