Linux

We didn't have -R, you had to go into every subdirectory and run the command manually.

I started using it before distros were really a thing. I got as far as having something that would boot to a shell, but then since I was 14 I had no idea what I was supposed to do.

Backed off until I bought a Slackware book that came with a CD. Then I had the fun of trying to get X working. Manually entering frequencies for your monitor was scary, because if you got it wrong you could damage the monitor.

Then I had a fun problem of either my modem would work, or my sound card would work, but never both at the same time.

Honestly I never got a system which I could actually use for anything, but I was a kid having fun, and it taught me to not be afraid of the computer.

My first experience was with two floppy images I found on "So much shareware! Vol.2".

It was labeled Linux 0.99b, no distro. It was not of much use to me at the time.

A couple of years later I got my hands on Slackware 2.0 on CD. So much time spent compiling your own kernel, because no modules and the whole thing had to fit in main memory (640kB). So much time spent fiddling with xf86config hoping you wouldn't fry your CRT.

Good times.

Then came gentoo, which had package management. No more did you have to browse sourceforge for endless dependencies to install something. No more did you have to re-install slackware on your root partition to update. So user-friendly in comparison.

We spent a lot of time on IRC.

MUDs kind of bridged the gap between IRC and games.

I remember spending a lot of time playing abuse, snes9x, quake + team fortress and quake2 + action quake.

Looking through music and budget software CDs at a computer store or a college vendor table, there would be one with a penguin or BSD mascot. It wasn't like the other discs that had DOS shareware games or utilities. The CD rom drives were 1x speed, attached to a card on the ISA bus, without plug and play, so it needed an interrupt number that didn't collide with other cards. The install process was curses based, with no mouse. There would be much time spent figuring out how to partition the drive, usually after buying a book. Back then, computer book sections were huge. The software install dialog had one line description per package, and it wasn't easy to tell what they did. Then there was setting up X Server and choosing a window manager. Not all video modes were supported, so it took a lot of trial and error with editing config files and resolutions before the the window environment would work. This was before home internet so it would take a weekend or all week to figure out. The only accessible communities in many parts were dialup bulletin boards, unless there was access to a college computer lab with a mosaic or netscape browser. At this point it was realized that I lived in a tech desert, quit my retail job, and moved.

I was just looking through old books and noticing my Yggdrasil manual the other day. That was one of the earliest plug and go cd-rom distributions. Before that was e.g. Slackware and the early Debian, both of which involved big piles of floppies. I also remember sending Linus an email and getting an answer. I'm sure he is too much of a busy celebrity for that now.

Imagine a pile of floppy disks, with stuffs inscribed on it that you never heard of....

... will you insert one into your computer and reboot it?

Why not just install an old version in a VM and find out?

But remember, no search engines for troubleshooting, forums and printed matter only. (And mailing lists and IRC, but they'd probably tell you to Google it, which is off limits for this exercise.)

Well, in the 90's I managed to essentially brick two NIC's by tinkering with the tulip driver on command line. In the distro I used it had to be done manually and I still have no idea as to what happened inside those NIC's, but they sure didn't work ever again. Yes, I made the same mistake twice.

There was a similar question a while ago with some nice reads in the answers :)

https://lemmy.ml/post/17575792

First time I format the whole disk, all msdos data (games) lost. I managed to install it then I opened vim to edit a file and I couldn't get out of vim I know it's a cliche, but there is real. To get out I have to call a friend, using the landline, the one who lends me the floppy disks (or maybe it was magazine cd) and ask he how to get out, he says, just press Shift and Z twice.

LUGs were very important back then especially when you were new.

My first time trying out Linux was with a bootable CD from a PC gaming magazine. It was Corel Linux. If I recall correctly it booted into KDE.

Unfortunately on my system the mouse cursor was invisible. The mouse worked, I just couldn't see where the cursor was. My brother who was using Linux full time couldn't help me fix it.