Patience Rewarded

Last week, I managed to snap up a copy of the very first issue of the Linux Journal, dating from 1994.

The LJ has had more than 180 issues published over the last fifteen years and I’ve had a complete run of it from issue two onwards since 1997, if I remember correctly.

Since then, I’ve had an automatic eBay search keep an eye out for a copy of the first issue, but, to my surprise, it has turned out to be an incredibly hard item to find. I’ve seen only three of them go in the last eight or nine years, but one of those was as part of a complete set and the owner had had them bound, possibly irrevocably. I can’t remember what was unusual about the other copy that I came across, but there was something odd there, too.

Anyway, after all these years of waiting, I’ve finally completed my set for the princely sum of £5. The Linux Journal has been a constant presence throughout my career in Linux, so there’s some sentimental value there, but it’s primarily just the collector in me that wanted to complete the run. After all, there’s little of practical use in a fifteen year old computer magazine. Not only has the face of Linux changed beyond all recognition in that time, but just think of the environment in which it operates. The Internet explosion was but a glimmer on the horizon back then.

I was the only bidder on this item, which probably says something about me.

I’m nearly as happy as a few years ago, when I purchased a dog-eared set of the original two volume Bell Labs’ UNIX Programmer’s Manual (yes, a hard copy of the original Seventh Edition UNIX man pages).

I’m a sucker for UNIX and Internet history; that’s all there is to it.