Anyone old enough to remember using v1.0?
I never want to touch a Slackware box, but I respect the hell out of it, and I’m glad it exists
My first distro was a slackwear 1.x boot root floppy pair. To play around with on our brand new 60* megahertz Pentium system we got Christmas 93.
Yeah I installed 1.0 from floppy disks. I was really glad to get it on CD-ROM a bit later. I probably still have those floppies around here somewhere… I wonder if they still boot? Still have my old 486 around here somewhere too, come to think of it, but I needed a custom kernel to support my SCSI card and I’m definitely not going through that pain again. (Yes I had to boot off floppy drives in order to build a kernel image to be able to install it on my hard drive.)
Probably time to get rid of it.
Slackware was my first Linux distro
Now post one without the shirt to be distro-agnostic.
To celebrate Slackware turning 30, I took off my shirt. My girlfriend and six people on the internet were super impressed by my slackware tattoo.
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I too started with Slackware 3. Downloaded a billion disks from a BBS over a 14.4 modem. It was definitely an improvement over my previous experience of accidentally downloading Minix in Portuguese. That is a hard way to learn an OS or a language, let alone both simultaneously.
Minix! I actually went so far as to track down a copy of minix on Usenet and bought it, complete with floppy disks. But before I got around to installing it Linux became available, and I never got around to it. Can’t even imagine trying to install it in a foreign language. (It would be foreign for me anyway)
sigh yes I remember 1.0 taking up a lot of my 160mb hard disk.
Things I remember: changing the command line font was mindblowing. I managed to get xeyes to run, but not a window manager, so I just had massive eyes following the cursor around. I compiled a lot of my really shoddy C code but had no idea what I was doing. The number of disks that Emacs needed felt disproportionate at 5 when MS Word 2.0 fitted on 3, and Doom fitted on 3 and a half.
It was all very exciting, and felt like you were “sticking it to the man” by not using ms-dos :-)
These days I just use computers as a tool, and as such I have Linux Mint on my home machine.
I installed 1.0… all 23 discs that I downloaded at 2400bps because I couldn’t afford a faster modem.
Does the math. 24 disks, 1.44 MB each. 34.5 MB total. That’s 34,500,000 bytes. 2400 bps is actually 300 bytes per second, assuming no bits wasted on error correction or something. So 115k seconds. Or about 32 hours. Assuming no errors, blips, kids pickup up the phone, etc. Probably at least three days if you can only use your modem during off-peak hours like most of us dial up users of the era.
Do you remember it fondly? Or do you shudder in pain? ;)
Before CD distros? Ma Bell loved us lots … or at least our wallets.
Not OP but, personally not having a modem at that time, I convinced a well-off friend that he should try it. Then I copied his disks.
