Patrick Volkerding, the creator of Slackware Linux, was born on October 20, 1966. While a computer science student at Minnesota State University Moorhead in the early 1990s, he started tweaking and fixing a Linux distribution called Softlanding Linux System for his own use, and by July 1993 those personal fixes had grown into their own release: Slackware.
Slackware mattered because of what it deliberately didn’t do. Where later distributions built elaborate package managers and automatic dependency resolution, Slackware stayed close to the Unix philosophy of simple, transparent tools and manual configuration, trusting the administrator to understand their own system rather than abstracting that away. That hands-off design earned it a reputation as a distribution for people who wanted to actually learn Linux, not just run it, and it’s the reason Slackware is still, decades later, widely recognized as the oldest Linux distribution still actively maintained, with Volkerding still at the helm as its “benevolent dictator for life.”
Slackware never chased mainstream popularity the way Ubuntu or Fedora later would, but its influence on Linux culture, and on the generation of sysadmins who cut their teeth configuring it by hand, is hard to overstate.
Also on this day: in 2018, the BepiColombo spacecraft launched aboard an Ariane 5 rocket on its long journey to study Mercury, the least-explored rocky planet in the solar system.
Source: Wikipedia: Patrick Volkerding, Slackware: About
Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.
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