Dirk Hohndel shares some memories from the early days of Linux.

“I’m one of the guilty people who started before this was cool. I saw Linux’s posts to combos mimics in August of 91. Back then I didn’t have a 386, I only had a 286. I sent him an email and said, “Hey, does this work?” And he is like, no, it doesn’t work,” recalls Dirk Hohndel, VP and Chief Open Source Officer at VMware, “So I ended up saving money, I was a student at the University of würzburg and bought myself a 386SX 16 MHz processor. The machine had two megabytes, two megabytes of memory. And so in November I started the version .011 of Linux, which was the first one that actually was able to page. So the previous version didn’t start on my machine because it didn’t have enough memory for that. Linux had a four megabyte system back then. So to me, I have kind of a front row seat through the early days of all that.”

Check out the full interview with Hohndel.