My first installation in 1995 or 1996 was from a set of about 12 overwritten AOL floppy disks my friend had built from his installation of Slackware onto a 386S

My first installation in 1995 or 1996 was from a set of about 12 overwritten AOL floppy disks my friend had built from his installation of Slackware onto a 386SX. Later I got a 486 with a first gen 1x Sony CDROM drive that had it's own controller card, and I didn't have documentation for the DMA and IRQ settings. I had a RedHat CD from a magazine, so I had to go through a very long installation startup process from boot floppies to get to the CD config, and just kept guessing and rebooting until it finally worked and I discovered it wouldn't read the CD. I ended up going to a RedHat installfest somewhere in Maryland in the DC suburbs, I think at a Navy facility? It was on a Saturday and we were alone in this big government building and I remember there being a big rolling display of slices of a monkey brain in the lab where the installfest was being held. They had loaner 3Com 10baseT cards and a network install server running, so I was finally able to get it all working.