[acidburn1995]

My first install was slackware 3.0 on 4mb. You had to manually partition the disk and setup swap space before you could even launch the installer.

This was a minor inconvenience compared to swapping the 40 1.44mb disks needed to install it because I couldn't get it to use my pre-atapi cdrom drive correctly. Using the cdrom drive it would work for a little bit, and then everything would start timing out. And, a network install was some science fiction as far as I and my 9600bps modem were concerned.

Then once you got it all installed you could start trying to get X11 and ppp to work...

[glandium]

My first install was probably Slackware 3.0 too (considering the dates, it could have been 2.3, but I don't think I've used a kernel older than the famously stable 1.2.13), but it was not on my own machine. Did that with two friends on one of them's Pentium. We had downloaded a set of 40 floppies at university and brought the whole thing to his place (because we also didn't have either access to a modem and/or a cdrom drive).

We had bought 40 floppy disks in a bundle, and it turns out one of them was crappy and ended corrupted. It also turned out it was the last of the set of disks for the X11 package. So we had a shiny Slackware install... without X.

Fortunately, iirc, Doom was there intact, and we could run it with the "console" svga backend (that was outside X, but before Linux had the framebuffer, I don't remember how that worked exactly)

Had to wait for the next day to re-download the corrupted image on a different floppy, and install the X11 package.

[andybest]

That must have been frustrating to say the least. I have many memories of transporting essays to school on a floppy, only to have it be corrupted by the time I got there.

[KGIII]

Marginally off topic, but this sub-thread reminds me of the many times I have seen/heard people pining for ye olden days of computing. For whatever reason, people remember them through rose colored glasses.

They will say computers were better then. I disagree entirely. They were horrible and had much less capacity.

I see the same thing for the Internet. People will say they miss the time when it wasn't open for commercial activity. Hogwash... I know, I was there. Content was lacking, speeds were horrible, discoverability was an arcane art, and the costs were obscene.

I'm guessing, not my domain, there is some sort of psychological reason for this sort of thing. Computers were giant, more limited, and expensive. The 'net was no better.

[acidburn1995]

A while ago I tried installing Slackware 3.0 on Virtual Box out of nostalgia, and it was everything I remembered and worse. I only managed to get XFree86 to start up in some 300x200 mode that would pan around the 'virtual' size. Getting networking working required a kernel recompilation.

Even after all that, there wasn't much it could do. I'm not sure why I insisted on running that instead of Windows 95.

[KGIII]

Yeah. I have fallen into the VM hole. I even have images for Plan9. I am not proud of this, no... No, no I am not.

My only defense is that I didn't do so out of a fake memory of a glorious past. I just like tinkering.

[andybest]

I remember trying to research things on the web before the days of Google and Wikipedia- it was much easier to go to the library back then, in my experience. The ways that these tools have changed the ways that people work is astounding

[KGIII]

I do wonder why some folks remember those days through rose colored glasses. Humans confuse me.

It happens with other things. People say cars were better. Nope. Life was better. Probably not. Etc...

[smhenderson]

* You had to manually partition the disk and setup swap space before you could even launch the installer.*

As of my last install of Slackware 14.1 you still have to do this.

Slackware is a wonderful distribution and keeps most important packages pretty close to up to date but Patrick seems to very much be a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" kind of developer. My first Slackware was 2.1 or 2.2 (just remember if was 1995) and other than the fact I used an ISO image of 14.1 instead of 10's of floppies the install is very much the same after all these years.

[rahimnathwani]

"This was a minor inconvenience compared to swapping the 40 1.44mb disks needed to install it"

This was a minor inconvenience compared with recompiling the kernel overnight in order to add soundblaster support. (This was before modules.)

(Oh, and I learnt not to buy cheap no-name floppies, after the installation process failed several times, each at a different stage.)

[acidburn1995]

To this day, I can remember how to build a 1.2.X kernel. You were also very lucky if you had a soundblaster card, because only a handful of sound drivers that were in the kernel.

A little later OSS came out. To get sound to work a lot of cases you had to shell out money for commercial sound drivers, or get a crack from #linuxwarez.

[yellowapple]

"You had to manually partition the disk and setup swap space before you could even launch the installer."

You still do with Slackware ;)