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Linux Counter Logo Ten Years of the Linux Counter

The Beginning

On September 30, 1993, a message appeared on the then-newborn newsgroup comp.os.linux.announce: 

From: hta@uninett.no (Harald T. Alvestrand)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.announce
Subject: Counting Linux users: an attempt
 
Hello,
 
there have been many attempts at defining the size of the Linux
user base. None of them contained hard data.
 
Now, in an attempt to establish a lower limit on the number of
Linux users, I have put up a MAIL SERVER that does counting.
......
(In fact, the first registration happened only 2 days before, on September 28 - this was not a project that did a lot of testing before world-wide deployment!)

A few days later, on October 15, 3000 people had registered - a response both encouraging and challenging!

Little did the brash young engineer behind the message know that this would be the start of many years of work, involving people from many continents and hundreds of thousands of registrants.

Growth, change and (some) maturity

Once the rush had died down, things became boring for a while. Stats were fun; twiddling with some Perl programming to give people the option of giving more information was fun (and greatly increased the relevance of the "per country statistics" that have been a staple of the counter almost since inception!)

The next big change was triggered by an email from the Netherlands, from Patrick Reijnen, saying "I have made some web pages that send email to the counter - are you interested?"

I, then being a neophyte in all things Web, was of course interested - and soon after, in December 1994, the first Web interface to the Counter was a fact, and the registration rate once again hit the roof. People enjoyed the Web!

At this time, the counter was still running on a not very privilleged account on a server that UNINETT, the university network of Norway, also used for many other things; this can be seen from the counter being located at port 29659 (a number derived from my birthday).

After some time, the counter moved to port 80 on its own virtual Web server; the first announcement of the counter at its traditional URL of "counter.li.org" is seen in February 1997.
(The name has its own history, btw - being something of a technology purist, I resented the "conventional wisdom" that all Web sites should be named "www", and have its own domain name directly under .com - instead, I contacted Linux International and got allocated the subdomain "counter" from them, and used the domain name directly as the web server name. It works!)

It was not until I moved from UNINETT to EDB Maxware in 1997 that the counter (eventually) got its own machine. This was a Pentium 90 with 32 Mbytes of RAM, "liberated" from use as a workstation by someone who thought it was too slow. It also served as my personal mailserver and a lot of other purposes. But it worked!

Just how well it worked could be seen in February 1999, when the counter was first mentioned on Slashdot. 1400 people managed to get registered that day, and amazingly, the machine worked under the load. Just barely!
The next time, with the configuration a little better tuned, 2600 of the visitors got registered. A lot at the time!

This, however, left me with a permanent worry on how to enable the service to survive if it really became popular; it was clear that "borrowed" hardware was not the solution. I talked to friends about it, who talked with friends (the most entertaining suggestion was that we should take advantage of MSN's offer of nearly-free webhosting :-) - and in October of 1999, thanks especially to the efforts of Jim Gettys of X fame, the counter project took delivery of its very own DEC Alpha server.
Joy - 256 MBytes of RAM, 27 Gbytes of disc - I was in heaven!

The Slashdotting also emphasized to me that the counter had grown larger than what a single person could sensibly maintain in his spare time, and that I needed help - on May 1, 1999, the Linux Counter Project was "officially" registered, and soon after, it had a board of directors selected.
(The founding meeting had only one person present - me - but nonetheless, it got started! I tried to register it as an organization in Norway - but the project foundered on the fact that an organization in Norway has to have its articles of incorporation filed in Norwegian - and I had written them in English; having them in Norwegian required the services of an accredited translator. Sigh...)

1999 was also the counter's greatest year - with a sustained registration rate of 4000 registrations per month, and peaks of up to 7000 registrations per month.

Near the end of 1999, my worry about the data in the counter also increased - I knew that many of the people registered had registered once and then forgotten. Perhaps they were not even using Linux any more? What could I do to make the data more accurate?

The necessary solution was, of course, to invite people to renew their entries, and to remove those not renewed. This was not much fun, so it took a long time - in January 2001, the reminders started to go out, and in November 2001, the Great Deletion took place, dropping the count from 200.000 to near 120.000.

It's been growing ever since, reaching 138.000 at the time of this writing, despite the continued stream of removals. But there are 170.000 dead accounts lying in cold storage, waiting for their owners to return and reclaim them.....

Not that everything else has been passive - in early 2002, we noticed that certain queries were going exceedingly slowly; it was traced down to a lack of RAM on the counter. Rather than buying more memory, a new PC-type box donated from Linpro was installed as a dedicated backend SQL server - it didn't solve everything, but it made the counter breathe far easier.

And the country managers are managing, our key recovery team is recovering keys of users who've lost theirs apace, the off-again, on-again translate project is off-again, on-again..... things are happening.

Not fast, not as quickly as I would have liked it to happen - far too much is still waiting for me to do something about it, rather than have someone else in the volunteer corps do it. But I think the counter can stay around for another 10 years.

So why did I do it?

The answer has varied a bit over the years. First (and foremost) because it was fun to do. I could do it - nobody else did it, so I continued, gathering fellow wayfarers on the way.

And somehow, even with the many limitations that time, resources and respect for privacy placed upon it, it felt like a right thing to do. Letting Linux users stand up and be counted, allowing them to bravely publish their existence to the world and perhaps find their next-door neighbour to be a Linux user too - that seemed to me worthwhile.

Linux is, to me, one of the greatest experiments in social engineering - in the sense of doing engineering as a social activity, not in trying to revamp society! - that this planet has ever seen. Running the Linux Counter project has allowed me to have contacts and see things happening that I would otherwise have no way of knowing - getting email from the Norfolk Islands, the backwoods of Laos and Antarctica; finding resources and enjoying finding the right ways to utilize them; letting a problem stew until the solution was obvious (and, far too often, long overdue) - all these, to me, add up to joy in the project.

It's for fun!
 

My wishlist for the next ten years

A lot of things will undoubtedly happen to the counter over the coming decade. I don't think going away will be one of them. Some of the things I want to see, some day:

Thanks for the joy of the years gone by, and welcome back to the counter for the next ten years!

California, september 2003

Harald Alvestrand

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