4 ms·

I was going to say that I installed Linux on plenty of 286s back in the day, but after thinking about it some more, they must have all been 386s. My first few L

I was going to say that I installed Linux on plenty of 286s back in the day, but after thinking about it some more, they must have all been 386s. My first few Linux systems involved manually compiling the kernel and downloading and compiling individual GNU tools one at a time. The first kernel version I remember installing was 0.96, right around September 1992.

eb0la 5y ago
I remember a friend in the lab downloading linux and saving it in 3 1/4" floppies. He used about 100 disks. Two months later you could buy a magazine with Slackware linux on CDRom :-)
- johnwalkr 5y ago
  You could also download a boot disc for the installer, and connect to Slackware and install directly from FTP.
  - anthk 5y ago
    Internet connections were too expensive back in the day.
    - johnwalkr 5y ago
      That's true but it was still a good option if you could get your PC to a university lab. Shortly later you could also usually find a cd burner in a university lab. The grandparent commenter's friend must have installed slackware in a narrow time period where floppies were the only feasible option.