[jamiethehutt]

> you probably had to create a floppy boot disk by dd'ing it off the cdrom, as your BIOS was 50/50 able to support the El Torito extensions that allowed a CDROM to boot the computer.

I've got mine framed beside my desk[1]. For some reason I printed a label for the disk - it's dated 11/12/1999, what blows my mind is that at that time I'd only just turned 13 years old!

While I was a very smart kid I think whoever wrote the documentation back then to guide me through the process must have been quite incredible, or maybe it was just a better culture of documentation than we have today. I spent so much time reading TLDP that when I forget Bash's if syntax I remember the table from this page[2] before I even think of Google.

I would have been dual booting when I made that disk but after the Windows XP announcement my 14 year old self decided if I don't take the plunge now "I'll be seduced by Micro$oft's shiny new toys and assimilated by Bill Gateus of Borg" so sometime in spring 2001 I switched entirely to Linux and never looked back. At that time switching entirely was stupid and, frankly, masochistic but I'm VERY glad I did it.

[1] https://imgur.com/VHv8mzI

[2] http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/sect_07_01.htm...