3 ms·

"Risky", it sounds so strange now to call dual booting "risky". But it was a different time, where remediating a borked software change wasn't google-able. Ed

• throwawayx38 4y ago
  To be fair, it may not have been the dual boot itself that was risky. Unless they had a dedicated harddrive, they would also need to resize existing fat32/ntfs partitions and add a couple of new partitions for Linux. This process had a certain risk.
  • bigger_cheese 4y ago
    I have vague memories from early days of using Linux that you used to have to manually set the modeline for your videocard in X11 - if you got things wrong you could potentially permanently damage the monitor.
• time0ut 4y ago
  Heh, I meant it in a tongue in cheek way. My dad thought it was too risky.
  • metadat 4y ago
    I understand, that's what I found amusing. It's easy to imagine a dad in the 90s, when computers were much more costly, being like "hell no you aren't doing that to the family computer!" :) Maybe I'm still misinterpreting, but this was where my mind went. Man, I wish I could've appreciated how distinct the 90s were as a kid, but I was too young and dumb to have a shred of hope of being that aware!
    • to11mtm 4y ago
      In the era of that kind of PC, I remember the boot loaders being a bit more touchy. I never 'totally borked' a PC with LILO but definitely had to fix some things at least once, and that was with a nice thick Slackware 7.1 book to guide me. GRUB, IIRC, vastly improved things but took a little while to get there and truly 'easy-peasy'