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Slackware was my first distro, purchased a diskette set by mail from a company in Computer Shopper magazine and installed it on a 386 my parents gave me after b

Slackware was my first distro, purchased a diskette set by mail from a company in Computer Shopper magazine and installed it on a 386 my parents gave me after buying an IBM PS/1 with a 486DX2 in 1991 (or 1992?). I used it to get Internet access via SLIP dial-up to a mainframe at the University of Missouri and from there to play MUDs which ended up becoming an obsession for years and resulted in me learning C to modify DikuMUD. I’m really glad to see that Slackware is still alive and kicking even though I’m now mostly a FreeBSD and MacOS user.

orbere 5y ago
Funny, my first computer was an IBM PS/1 that I got for Christmas of 1992. I couldn't figure out how to install linux on it. Googling now I see someone talking about the hard disk controller being on the mobo and unsupported, and someone saying they had to supply hard disk geometry info. That was beyond me as a pre-teen. Didn't get my first box to install slackware on until I traded two BB guns for a tower PC as a teenager.
- tristor 5y ago
  To be fair, I don't think the IBM PS/1 ever had Linux installed on it. It ran Windows 3.1 and later Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, and we had Trumpet Winsock on it to get Internet connectivity through the local library at some point (originally my parents used Prodigy only, I introduced them to the Internet). The 386 system I put Slackware on was a Tandy of some type (I don't remember the exact model) which had a 20MB hard drive in place of where it typically would have a second 3.5" floppy drive. IIRC, I was never able to get sound working on it, but had no problem getting everything else generally working. A handful of years later my parents bought a Dell running Windows 98 SE and I built my first custom computer which had an AMD K6-2 and also ran Windows so I could play computer games (which at the time were more interesting to me) and it also had the just released Diamond Monster3D based on the Voodoo2 chipset w/ separate 2D accelerator card via VGA passthru. That was my first foray into proper 3D gaming and got me interested in hardware and overclocking, which dominated most of my interest until my later teen years when I started contributing to open source and got back into Linux.

orbere 5y ago

Funny, my first computer was an IBM PS/1 that I got for Christmas of 1992. I couldn't figure out how to install linux on it. Googling now I see someone talking about the hard disk controller being on the mobo and unsupported, and someone saying they had to supply hard disk geometry info. That was beyond me as a pre-teen. Didn't get my first box to install slackware on until I traded two BB guns for a tower PC as a teenager.

tristor 5y ago
To be fair, I don't think the IBM PS/1 ever had Linux installed on it. It ran Windows 3.1 and later Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, and we had Trumpet Winsock on it to get Internet connectivity through the local library at some point (originally my parents used Prodigy only, I introduced them to the Internet). The 386 system I put Slackware on was a Tandy of some type (I don't remember the exact model) which had a 20MB hard drive in place of where it typically would have a second 3.5" floppy drive. IIRC, I was never able to get sound working on it, but had no problem getting everything else generally working. A handful of years later my parents bought a Dell running Windows 98 SE and I built my first custom computer which had an AMD K6-2 and also ran Windows so I could play computer games (which at the time were more interesting to me) and it also had the just released Diamond Monster3D based on the Voodoo2 chipset w/ separate 2D accelerator card via VGA passthru. That was my first foray into proper 3D gaming and got me interested in hardware and overclocking, which dominated most of my interest until my later teen years when I started contributing to open source and got back into Linux.