[msla]

Dial-up was still the predominant mode of Internet access, to the point even Free Software was often sold in the form of people selling CD-ROMs because downloading a full Debian or Slackware install over an occasional bits per second connection was too painful to contemplate. Especially if the phone company demonstrated Quality by dropping your long-running connection.

And that was assuming you had a CD-ROM drive. Otherwise, you were looking at stacks of floppies. (I still remember being told not to waste money buying pre-formatted floppies because a stray boombox would erase that formatting. I mean, true or not, that piece of advice is so perfectly of a specific era it deserves to be remembered. Besides, you couldn't get more capacity out of the disk if you went with the formatting The Man recommended.) Even hard disks were hilariously slow and low-capacity back then, especially if your computer was more scuzzy than SCSI.

Also:

> strong cryptography is not yet universally illegal.

Communications Decency Act! Marty Rimm! Clipper Chip! Skipjack!

There. Have I put a sufficient amount of The Fear into you yet?

[anthk]

Even in DVD times I bought the full Debian release on DVD. 4. 3 for binaries, 1 for the sources. 20 EUR (~$20). A bargain.