Imagine a pile of floppy disks, with stuffs inscribed on it that you never heard of…

… will you insert one into your computer and reboot it?

I got a very early version of Debian from a friend when I was in college. I had a very old computer gifted to me but couldn’t get Windows to install. I ran that badboy with no window manager, just text. I used elinks for my web browser and pine for email. VI was where I wrote my papers. Drivers were a problem, so I had to save papers on a disk to print from a computer at a library.

“Please insert Slackware disk Set A disk 3”

It wasn’t too early, maybe 1997.

I was like 12 or so and I had just installed Linux.

I figured out, from the book I was working with, how to get my windows partition to automaticallyount at boot. Awesome!

I had not been able to figure out how to start “x” though.

So I rebooted into Windows, for on EFnet #linux, and asked around.

Got a command, wrote it down on a slip of paper, and rebooted into Linux.

I should mention, I also hadn’t figured out about privileges, or at least why you wouldn’t want to run around as root.

Anyway, I started typing in the command that I wrote down: rm -rf /.

I don’t have to tell you all, that is not the correct command. The correct command was startx.

After I figured it was taking way too long, I decided to look up what the command does, and then immediately shut down the system.

It was far too late.

Honestly, it sucked. Like most computing at the time. Everything came on a ton of floppy disks, it was impossible to update online unless you had a good connection (which nobody did), and you had to do everything by hand, including compiling a lot of stuff which took forever. I mean, I’m glad I got the experience, but I would never wanna go back to that. It sucked.

The danger of poorly configuring your XF86Config in a way that could irreparably damage your giant CRT monitor was thrilling.

I was born in the 80s and never even though about Linux until very recently.

I remember building the kernel with the NE2000 drivers and having a network card for just installation and getting the 3com or RTL driver source over to the new install, then compiling those drivers, installing them, and downing the system to put the proper card in. There was a very small subset of sound cards and video cards that worked reliably. The notion that Linux was the OS where hardware just worked out of the box was ludicrous.

The DEs were pretty horrible and the software to use on them was scant. So desktop Linux was a pipe dream. I used Linux entirely as a security/server appliance. I built a couple hundred iptable/ipchains firewalls for businesses out of recycled pentium type desktops until hardware firewalls became a thing, it was fairly lucrative for a while there.

My first experience was with two floppy images I found on “So much shareware! Vol.2”.

It was labeled Linux 0.99b, no distro. It was not of much use to me at the time.

A couple of years later I got my hands on Slackware 2.0 on CD. So much time spent compiling your own kernel, because no modules and the whole thing had to fit in main memory (640kB). So much time spent fiddling with xf86config hoping you wouldn’t fry your CRT.

Good times.

Then came gentoo, which had package management. No more did you have to browse sourceforge for endless dependencies to install something. No more did you have to re-install slackware on your root partition to update. So user-friendly in comparison.

We spent a lot of time on IRC.

MUDs kind of bridged the gap between IRC and games.

I remember spending a lot of time playing abuse, snes9x, quake + team fortress and quake2 + action quake.

Before modularized kernels became the standard I was constantly rerunning “make menuconfig” and recompiling to try different options, or more likely adding something critical back in :-D

Prior to the website rpmfind.net, installing software was to put it mildly, a chore. Due to package dependency, you’d start the compile, and it would fail due to missing libraries. You’d then go out and find those libraries, only to have them fail on compile…due to missing libraries…it would go on like until you finally were able to compile the original package - at this point though you compiled it out of sheer spite for the universe that put you in that position.

I rate the experience a solid 5/7

Alrighty, old Linux user from the earliest of days.

It was fun, really great to have one-on-one with Linus when Lilo gave issues with the graphic card and the screen kept blank during booting.

It was new, few fellow students where interested, but the few that did, all have serious jobs in IT right know.

Probably the mindset and the drive to test out new stuff, combined with the power Linux gave.

Clumsy. Manual. No multimedia support really. Compiling everything on 486 machines took hours.

Can’t say I look back fondly on it.

BeOS community was fucking awesome though. That felt like the cutting edge at the time.

Looking through music and budget software CDs at a computer store or a college vendor table, there would be one with a penguin or BSD mascot. It wasn’t like the other discs that had DOS shareware games or utilities. The CD rom drives were 1x speed, attached to a card on the ISA bus, without plug and play, so it needed an interrupt number that didn’t collide with other cards. The install process was curses based, with no mouse. There would be much time spent figuring out how to partition the drive, usually after buying a book. Back then, computer book sections were huge. The software install dialog had one line description per package, and it wasn’t easy to tell what they did. Then there was setting up X Server and choosing a window manager. Not all video modes were supported, so it took a lot of trial and error with editing config files and resolutions before the the window environment would work. This was before home internet so it would take a weekend or all week to figure out. The only accessible communities in many parts were dialup bulletin boards, unless there was access to a college computer lab with a mosaic or netscape browser. At this point it was realized that I lived in a tech desert, quit my retail job, and moved.

First time I format the whole disk, all msdos data (games) lost. I managed to install it then I opened vim to edit a file and I couldn’t get out of vim I know it’s a cliche, but there is real. To get out I have to call a friend, using the landline, the one who lends me the floppy disks (or maybe it was magazine cd) and ask he how to get out, he says, just press Shift and Z twice.