My Linus story from this era: my brother had a brand new 486, and when he got it, he managed to convince my parents to get him a second hard drive, so that he c

My Linus story from this era: my brother had a brand new 486, and when he got it, he managed to convince my parents to get him a second hard drive, so that he could run Linux. We did not understand the idea of disk partitions at the time, and I don't even remember the exact details--I believe we booted from floppy to get into Linux. After spending a couple of days on tech support figuring out how to set the master/slave jumpers on the drives, we felt like we were making good progress. That's right, not all drives labeled their jumpers, and given that the web was a few years from being invented, there were not any support websites on which we could look up that info, so phone was the only way. Next, we spent a week going to the UIUC CCSO computer lab and downloading slackware floppies. We installed them, and managed to get everything up and running... until we tried getting X to run. We had a strange 800x600 monitor, and getting the dot clocks right was another week of trial-and-error. The dot clock hurdle surmounted, another problem: almost anything "big" we did under X would pretty quickly cause a kernel panic. So what did we do? We followed what the README file in Linux said to do: we emailed Linus Torvalds the panic message. A few hours later, we had a response. Linus noticed that the crashes were all with pointers with a value of 0x08000000 (or whatever) which most likely was supposed to be a null pointer, but one of our SIMMs probably had a bit-stuck-at-1 error. He apologized for not being able to tell us which SIMM in the system it was, but encouraged us to swap hardware. The local computer store sales guys were unimpressed that LINUS TORVALDS HIMSELF had told us we bad memory, but we eventually got them to do a warranty exchange, probably just to get us to go away. And I'm 100% sure those modules found themselves in the next system they built for a different customer. New SIMM modules in hand and the problem was resolved!