On Wed, Nov 07, 2012 at 10:33:33AM +1100, Peter Ross wrote:
I bought my first PC at home Northern summer 1993, a AMD 386 40 MHz system with 4 MB Ram (and a black&white 14" monitor).
The first "PC" I ever bought was an XT clone in 1982. IIRC it cost about $1500 for 640K RAM and dual 360K floppies, with a hercules graphics card and an amber monitor (the herc card didn't do colour, but the text quality was vastly superior to what a CGA card was capable of). The 20MB hard disk I bought a few months later cost another $1000. enormous, 20MB was more than 55 floppies worth of data. (prior to that, i had TRS-80s). My first linux system had an 80386 CPU (an Intel CPU originally, later upgraded to AMD 386-40) with 4MB like yours, with an EGA card and monitor and, IIRC, a 2nd-hand SCSI 320MB hard disk and controller card. Even with 0.x kernels, compiling the kernel was an overnight job. I remember getting the 4MB RAM for that motherboard at the bargain price of $1000 (and that WAS a good price at the time). 4GB, or 1024 times as much RAM, costs $18 today. I think I bought the parts for and built the machine in 1990. Ran ms-dos and desqview on it at first (popular choice at the time for fidonet), then tried OS/2, and installed linux in '91 (partly because, unlike OS/2, it supported serial terminals and uucp worked properly, and i was in the process of switching from fidonet to APANA). I first installed linux on a 50MB partition to try it out...and two weeks later completely reformatted the disk, converted entirely to linux, and never looked back.
Finally "Unix" at home:-) I downloaded a bunch of 3 1/2" floppies from ther FTP server at Uni Rostock.
I am not sure anymore whether it was SLS or the first Slackware release. It came with "b[1-?]" (base system) disks, "x[1-?]" (X11) disks, and I believe there were two or three more series (with different letters) but I don't remember which. One was a "n" (network) series, supplying TCP/IP utilities, I think.
sounds like early-90s slackware. i vaguely recall downloading and installing those floppies. I started with MCC and then SLS (or maybe the other way around, can't remember exactly), switched to slackware, then later switched to debian in '94....have used that by preference ever since. i've used other distros when i had to (e.g. RH or SuSE at work) but if i have the choice, i'll always use debian. hmmmm....that's right. it must have been MCC -> SLS -> Slackware because the reason i switched to slackware was that it was just like SLS but with lots of bugs fixed. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>