[TriLUG] Fwd: Organize a Debian Birthday party in your city

[Thomas Gardner]

As near as I can tell, I first started using Linux some time before
March of 1992.  I only remember that because I remember the fellow
who told me about it was a co-worker, and I remember I left that job
for another in March 1992.  My boss at that job had allowed me to
take a company owned 386 home to play with, so I was all set.  My own
machine was a 8088 that I had literally soldered together from a kit
many years earlier.  It didn't even have memory on the motherboard.
Even with the two full-sized memory cards with 256K each, it would
never be enough to run Linux.  It was running Minix, but man, that
was a pretty restricted implementation of Unix.  Anyway, thanks to
my friend and boss, I had a nice 386 I could run Linux on.

At that time, there was no distribution that could actually do its
own install, or at least none that I knew of.  There were a bunch of
binary files you could download to put in your /bin and /usr/bin and
/etc, etc. directories.  To boot, you had to raw write two floppies
(one with the kernel and the other with a very limited root FS).
You had to edit the kernel image before writing it to the floppy
with the binary editor of your choice to tell it where your root FS
would be.  I remember being impressed that it would allow you to boot
from a single-floppy machine because it was smart enough to realize
that if you told it your root image was on the same floppy that
the kernel just booted from, it had to prompt you to swap floppies.
Being a DOS lUser at the time, I was easily impressed, I suppose.

Once you booted from floppy, you had a machine with just enough brains
to create a FS on a partition that you'd set aside earlier using the
DOS fdisk or whatever.  Once you had a FS made, (I think the slightly
enhanced Minix FS was your only option, but I could be remembering
wrong, there), you could copy a few things onto it that you'd
previously downloaded to your DOS hard drive.

Now, you were ready to edit that binary kernel file again, and this
time tell it that the root partition was now a real partition on your
hard drive.  Woo-hoo!  Write that sucker to floppy (which you could
now do with Linux by just copying to /dev/fd0 or whatever) and boot
to your new Linux system.

I booted from floppy for years after that, because even after LILO
came out, something I'd heard or read or maybe even imagined about
it spooked me.  I finally started using LILO when it became too much
of an embarrassment to me that I was still booting from floppies.

I remember the first machine I purchased myself to run Linux (Gwen).
It was a Gateway 2000, 50Mhz clock-doubled 486 with an EISA bus!  Man,
it was a sweet ride at the time.  That thing cost me over 4 grand
(yikes).  I think a week later they were selling it for about half
that.  :-)  I didn't care.  I was in hog heaven.  Still booting from
floppies, of course.  Don't want to trust that new-fangled LILO thing.

I remember when I first got it working well with X and everything,
one annoying bug kept coming up:  If I updated a large enough portion
of the screen fast enough in X (make an xterm big enough to take up
most of the physical screen and then cat some large text file, for
instance, would be a guaranteed way to make it happen), my machine
would just hang.  For a while I was just careful what I did in X
while I tried to figure it out for myself.  Eventually I asked on
Usenet and someone there knew what the problem was:  The video card
I had in it was so fast, and X was so much more efficient at getting
data to that card than Winderz was, it was able to use 100% of the
bus bandwidth.  Unfortunately, memory refresh was done over the same
bus during idle bus cycles.  No idle, no memory refresh.  No memory
refresh, the machine just forgets what it was doing and starts
grabbing random bit patterns and interpreting them as instructions.
Electronic daydreaming, or maybe butterfly chasing, if you will.
Anyway, there was a jumper on my video card that wasn't documented,
but the fellow told me that if I just jumped that, I probably wouldn't
notice the difference in performance (which I didn't), but it would
slow the card down enough to allow memory refresh to occur.  He was
right.  The machine worked flawlessly until it got hit by lightning
many years later.  Poor Gwen.  May she rest in peace.

I think the first real distribution I tried was SLS (the ``Soft Landing
System'' for DOS lUsers).  Oh, it was so much easier to install.
I didn't feel the great sense of accomplishment as I did with the
old way, but I was well pleased with all the new goodies it brought
with it.

I remember once downloading a new copy of some distribution.  Don't
remember which distro for sure.  It might have been Slackware.  I do
remember it was a huge number of 3.5" floppies.  It took me something
like 24 or 48 hours of download time at 14.4 Kbaud (absolutely bleeding
edge, I was).  Thankfully, I had a separate phone line just so I could
pull stuff like that without messing up everyone else in the house.
I was clever, though: I used term to duplex the line.  You'd dial the
phone and connect to a machine at school with your favorite method
(Kermit or whatever), and start term on that end.  Then escape back
to the local side and run term on the local side, too telling it where
the serial device was that had the already connected modem on it, and
the two terms would now talk to each other through the phone line.
Now all your connections would be done through term commands which
would do all communication through those two term masters.  Now you
could connect as many times as you needed to over that line, and
even run X programs on the remote end and have the screen show up on
your side (if you had a boundless supply of patience).  It also had
a special command to download a file through the multiplexed line.
So, while I was downloading, I could still connect to school and
check mail and whatnot.

I remember I had a 10M (yes, 10 MEG) disk space limit on my
account at school, but the distro required something like 72 Meg.
I wasn't about to go FTP a bunch of files (floppy images) from the
FTP site to school, then download those from school to home over the
phone, then remove those files at school and start all over with the
next set.  Yikes.  What a huge pain.  Fortunately the FTP site I was
getting the distro from would allow you to do ``get directory.tar''
and it would automatically tar up the directory on the other side
and you'd get it delivered to you in a big tarball by that name in
your directory.  There's still the problem of that pesky 10M limit,
though.  So, I just created (on the school machine) a named pipe by
the name of directory.tar (or whatever, it was a predictable name),
used ftp to download the whole directory tree containing some huge
number of floppy images.  Of course, that pipe quickly fills up and
the ftp gets blocked.  At that point, on my local machine at home,
I fire up whatever the term command was to download a file, and gave
it the name of that named pipe to download.  Neither FTP nor term knew
that I was downloading a pipe instead of a file, and neither cared.
They just did what they were told.

I was already badly smitten with Unix, but the fact that it gave me
the kind of flexibility and didn't ask stupid questions like ``who
would ever come up with a use for something like that'' just made me
fall head over heels.  Man, Unix is cool.

Long live Unix!

L8r,
tg.

On 8/14/12, Bill Farrow <bill at arrowsreach.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 6:24 PM, Joseph Mack NA3T <jmack at wm7d.net> wrote:
>>>>> Has anyone in the club been using Linux for 19yrs?
>>>   My Yggdrasil Floppy & CD are the Fall 1993 set.
>
> I bought my first 486 whitebox PC in 1993 to play Doom and run Linux.
> Installing from 20+ floppies was a pain, especially when one or more
> floppies were bad, requiring a trip back to the comp-sci lab to
> re-write the bad floppy image.  Oh, and installing X was another 30
> floppies.  Having my own X Workstation at home was priceless.
>
> I think switched to debian in 1996 or 1997 - and I made it through the
> glibc transition in 1998.  Whew.
>
> Bill