[asveikau]

> In 1998 a friend and I had a small business of ordering Cheapbytes CD-ROMs from the US and relabeling them and then selling them for much more locally.

I ordered a few discs from cheapbytes in the US because it beat downloading ISOs on dial up...

Usually I'd just get the install CDs and then I'd rely on the package managers to upgrade to the next release, even though it took a long time. So I think I only ordered 2 discs from there.

But I wonder if you had access to a CD burner? They were common by 1998, you could have easily ordered 1 copy on cheapbytes and burned your own copies, might have saved you some international shipping.

[microtonal]

But I wonder if you had access to a CD burner? They were common by 1998, you could have easily ordered 1 copy on cheapbytes and burned your own copies, might have saved you some international shipping.

Not sure when we got our first CD burner, but when we had this small Linux CD business in 1997-1998, they certainly weren't common where I lived. IIRC it started around the same time (probably got our first in 98 or 99). But at the beginning 'pressed' CDs were cheaper than CD-Rs and people who bought them also preferred purchasing 'real' CDs (CD-Rs had a reputation in the beginning of not being very reliable).

[asveikau]

Yeah that's true. I think cheapbytes might have also been cost competitive with CD-Rs which were not super cheap in the beginning.

I believe I got my first cd burner, an internal ide unit, in 1998.