4 ms·

Yeah, bit hard for me to remember. I switched to Linux in 1995 around the time Windows 95 came out, because my 486/DX33 computer, with 4MB of RAM, wouldn't run

by rconti 1y ago

Yeah, bit hard for me to remember. I switched to Linux in 1995 around the time Windows 95 came out, because my 486/DX33 computer, with 4MB of RAM, wouldn't run it so I was going to be left behind anyway. 16MB of RAM (the only sensible upgrade due to stick sizes) would have been a colossal $400 ($840 today). Plus, on Windows 3.1, SLiRP/PPP + Trumpet Winsock was only barely usable for timelines and reasons I can't quite remember, so much of my internet life was through a shell account anyway; it made more sense to run Linux locally and have a native experience, rather than living on the internet through some piece of dialup modem terminal emulation software. Though, after installing Linux, with only 4MB of RAM, rebuilding the kernel took 8 hours. I didn't actually realize this was abnormal, or that the drive thrashing I heard at the time was swapping rather than just normal code compilation. It could start X, but only very, very slowly At some point later I got a Cyrix 5x86/133 (o/c'd to 160) with 16MB. Probably around 97-98. At that point, the graphical web became a reality for me as well. Otherwise, it was interactive stuff via telnet/ftp/usenet, and plenty of lynx for web.

asdff 1y ago
> drive thrashing I heard at the time was swapping rather than just normal code compilation. Funny how that was such a signal back then. Did the program crash? Lets listen. No, I can still hear it, its just taking its time. I'm not sure how long it took for me to realize the noise was coming from the drives and that wasn't the sound a cpu under load makes. Maybe a cpu under load noise (or an increasing brightness light) would actually be useful in some contexts: no need to hop on and run htop just look from across the room.
anthk 1y ago
Once you got a svgalib image viewer, it didn't really matter a lot. For newcomers, a similar experience would be using the framebuffer and running slrn against the NNTP servers from https://www.eternal-september.org https://www.eternal-september.org, using IRC (still alive too) and using trickle to throttle down your connection to 56k or ISDN speeds if you were lucky. Oh, an MUDs, of course. Today you can get a similar feeling with http://wiby.me http://wiby.me with tons of personal sites.

by rconti 1y ago

asdff 1y ago

> drive thrashing I heard at the time was swapping rather than just normal code compilation. Funny how that was such a signal back then. Did the program crash? Lets listen. No, I can still hear it, its just taking its time. I'm not sure how long it took for me to realize the noise was coming from the drives and that wasn't the sound a cpu under load makes. Maybe a cpu under load noise (or an increasing brightness light) would actually be useful in some contexts: no need to hop on and run htop just look from across the room.

anthk 1y ago

Once you got a svgalib image viewer, it didn't really matter a lot. For newcomers, a similar experience would be using the framebuffer and running slrn against the NNTP servers from https://www.eternal-september.org https://www.eternal-september.org, using IRC (still alive too) and using trickle to throttle down your connection to 56k or ISDN speeds if you were lucky. Oh, an MUDs, of course. Today you can get a similar feeling with http://wiby.me http://wiby.me with tons of personal sites.