Hey, thanks for the memories! <br><br>I was first introduced to *NIX in colage, back in 1989-ish; yeah, I remember 4DOS, too and wished that any DOS was as powerful and fun as UNIX. I think I started with Slack '96, I still have the book by the same title, came with the requisite CD, that shows the Linux "shark" mascot and remember installing it to some ancient hardware or another..486 VLB, I think. While cleaning up the Shed, I recently came across the sleeve + my notes for a WalnutCreek CD...remember them? *The* place to get slack or bsd cd's in the days of 14.4 dialup. I think that CD (with some early Linux, I assume Slack) was the impetus to buy my first 2x CD drive...by '98 I was struggling to get Red Hat to run on a dual p3-866 box that had a Mylex SCSI controller (some full length monster with a 'massive' 4MB on board cache)...I think it was eventually traced to smp spinlock problems in the kernel that never did get fixed...that was
about the time I started emailing David Hines, as I had resurected my first laptop...Funny, just about all of my earliest Linux memories revolve around hardware issues...now I usually stick to Ubuntu except for all those side projects of sqeezing tiny linux systems on to minimal hardware for one trick pony boxes...<br><br><b><i>Steve Johnson <srj@adnd.com></i></b> wrote:<blockquote class="replbq" style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;"> 10 years ago, I was running my own business that revolved around<br>Linux. My business partner and my self started a small ISP in 1995,<br>and we used slackware linux for our radius, shell, email, and web<br>servers.<br><br>My first experience with *nix operating systems was in 1991, I had<br>gotten a job at a local computer store as their bench tech, and I<br>found out that their whole point of sales system was running on a<br>intel based unix box. This was a commercial version of Unix,
I can't<br>recall what it was called.. Zenix? something like that.. It peaked my<br>interest.. I asked the boss for a copy of the program, and well he had<br>a fit about software piracy and basically said no way in hell..<br><br>So I wanted to learn unix, it intrigued me... After a while a customer<br>came in and told me about how he had access to the internet via a<br>company called CRL, so I signed up for $25 a month to get a unix<br>shell.. That pretty much got me started.. With in a month, I<br>discovered Linux.. I believe the distro was slackware, and I remeber<br>the version being .99 (I think that was the kernel version..)<br><br>My boss freaked, he could not believe that there was a FREE Unix OS<br>out there, and he actually accused me of stealing a copy of his OS (He<br>was an asshole.. he is also dead now.)<br><br>After running slackware on various different machines until about<br>1996, I finally switched to redhat Linux, which is where I stayed<br>until
sometime in 2002ish I switched to Debian.. I pretty much stay<br>with Debian until Ubuntu came out, and that's what I use now.<br><br>-Steve<br><br><br>On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 5:20 PM, Kyle Rankin <kyle@nblug.org> wrote:<br>> Hi NBLUG,<br>><br>> In honor of our upcoming 10 year anniversary, I thought it would be<br>> interesting to create a thread where those of us who have been using Linux<br>> that long and especially anyone who was at NBLUG the first year could<br>> reminisce a bit about Linux back then, and the group itself back then.<br>><br>> I'll start. I wasn't at NBLUG in 1998 (or even in the state), so I'll just<br>> start with what Linux was like for me back then. I started using Linux back<br>> in the beginning of 1998 with Redhat 5.1. A buddy at college helped me<br>> through the floppy install and eventually I had an fvwm95 desktop complete<br>> with the start menu so I could launch, well, mostly terminals, licq,
and<br>> xbill at the time. Oh and Netscape Navigator 4. I can't remember what exact<br>> Netscape version it was, but I do remember that it took me a while to get<br>> java to work.<br>><br>> I think at the time the main things that appealed to me about Linux was the<br>> availability of all the source for these applications. I was beginning CS<br>> at the time so the concept of actually seeing and modifying any program I<br>> wanted was amazing to me. Plus at the time we could either do development<br>> on the campus HP-UX servers (some of us used Visual C++ if we had it<br>> instead), so the idea of having a free development environment that closely<br>> mimicked the campus servers was pretty cool. I guess I must admit that it<br>> seemed pretty cool to be running this strange OS that few average people<br>> had heard about and that was pretty secure and stable compared to my<br>> Windows 95 desktop. Winnuke was popular around
that time and it was fun to<br>> chat with people who tried to attack you, but couldn't.<br>><br>> So, how about the rest of you 10yr+ Linux users?<br>><br>> --<br>> Kyle Rankin<br>> NBLUG President<br>> The North Bay Linux Users Group<br>> http://nblug.org<br>> IRC: greenfly@irc.freenode.net #nblug<br>> kyle@nblug.org<br>><br>> _______________________________________________<br>> talk mailing list<br>> talk@nblug.org<br>> http://nblug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk<br>><br><br><br><br>-- <br>"Knowing others is wisdom; Knowing the self is enlightenment;<br>Mastering others requires force; Mastering the self needs strength." -<br>Lao-Tzu<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>talk mailing list<br>talk@nblug.org<br>http://nblug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk<br></kyle@nblug.org></blockquote><br><p>