[ale] Ancient desktop
Leam Hall
leamhall at gmail.com
Wed May 10 08:10:44 EDT 2023
Hey Jon, cool story.
I never met Patrick, but it sounds like I'd want to. Too few decent humans these days. My wife was an E-1 (low pay) in the USAF at the time, and I couldn't afford Win 3.11/WfW. After an abortive attempt at OS2/Warp, she let me buy "Linux Unleashed", with the Slackware CD in it. A friend gave me a used Mitsumi single speed CD-ROM, and it took all night to compile the kernel on my i386.
O'Reilly's "Essential System Administration" was my learning path of choice, and each time I read through it, I seemed to have a different highlighter color handy. It wound up with half a dozen colors inside, and went with me on vacations.
And then I found Linux magazine...
Leam
On 5/10/23 00:57, Jon "maddog" Hall via Ale wrote:
> OK Chuck.....since you mentioned me then told a great story....
>
> I too was a user of Slackware (and I will tell anyone who will listen what a fine human being Patrick V. is) so I was downloading and installing the 150+ floppy images of an early release of Slackware. Only I was too CHEAP to buy 150+ diskettes, so after I had downloaded 75 and installed them I started reusing the first diskettes and (of course) diskette ~85 malfunctioned and O had to start the whole process over again.
>
> As I sat there cursing I happened to see an article about this little company that made a distribution that booted off CD-ROM.
>
> I did not have a CD-ROM at the time (remember that the first ones attached to your audio card) but I ran out THAT NIGHT and bought it along with a PC magazine that had that distribution in it.
>
> And that is how I started using Red Just.
>
> On Tue, May 9, 2023, 22:31 Chuck Payne <terrorpup at gmail.com <mailto:terrorpup at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> DJPfulio, the good ole Walcreek CD Packs, I still have mine ( and my FreeBSD ones as well). Slackware was my first distro, I have my book from Matt Welsh that Patrick signed for me. One of my biggest Geek treasures along with my Linux License plate, that I got from the other geek that goes by Maddog gave me at the the Atlanta Linux Showcase.
>
> I wish I had known about ALE at that time. I was alone learning this stuff. As Maddog states, X was a nightmare and don't get me started on compiling software. The pain of spending all weekend compile a kernel so that it can support S3 Diamond, only to have it blow out my cheap 17" monitor, that I had hiked in the snow because I lived at the bottom of hill and wanted a PC monitor for my Linux install.
>
> Ugh! I had no programming background here. I am trying to understand how to use configure to make sure I had all the libraries for getting AfterStep running on my Slackware install because TWM SUCK!!! I had no clue that AfterStep was based on NextSTEP. What was worse, I wasn't a PC user, I was a Mac Head and I had to learn how to format a disk to work on a Linux box, Mac OS was a pain to deal with DOS or Fat formats, . and because I had a roommate and one phone line, I usually stayed late at the office to use their internet and the PC to get my disk, lucky my boss was cool with me doing that because I kick off 200 to 300 CAD prints for our field offices.
>
> I just remember that a friend told me to go CompUSA by Red Hat 4.2, and I was happy because it was simple, rpms were cool. No compiling but Ugh, don't get me started on Dependence Hell, which was an early issue with RH. The one thing that was so cool was the sound test that came with RH, "This Linux Torval and I pronounce Linux Linux!" and I was able to use X without the nightmare, I got ppp working for local mom/pop ISP I worked part at ( Avana Communications ), I got a news reader software working and what was the best thing that came with 4.2, Real Player, I know a lot of people hated but, but I could listen to WCW Events for free and more important, I could listen to the Japanese Jazz show I listen too while I lived in Japan. Netscape was cool too, I had bought a few copies back when you had to buy it.
>
> 26 years ago, If I remember right, back then even number kernels were production and odd numbers were beta/test.
>
> I might not be a PUP anymore as I got white hair of an old dog, but I am so happy that I got to start then. A lot of distro have come and gone, but I can say that it has made me who I am today, why I still have my lab and the ton of computers I am running. Think about this, if someone told you 26 years ago, you can run a computer with 512 MB and 4 Cores on a board that the sizes of a stick of gum, want would you say. I got new Rock Chip Arm boards the same size of Raspberry Pi 4, that have 8 Cores and 16 GIGS of memory, more powerful that that AMD K 486 Series with 16 Megs of memory.
>
> I hate seeing everything to the cloud, I am lucky enough to have taught my son ( Who love my nic he stole it and just add a Jr. at the end of it. ) how to work hardware, he builds systems for his friends and is going to school for Engineering. Oh, that another thing, I never when to school for computers. I was just again lucky to be hang around Radio Shack with the TSR-80 came up and started learning from the guy that ran the store, at first he might me hanging around but once he saw I was picking up, he start teaching me a lot stuff.
>
> Jim, good luck with your old desktop, I can upload my disk on my Netcloud server if you need them.
>
> On Tue, May 9, 2023 at 2:59 PM Jon "maddog" Hall via Ale <ale at ale.org <mailto:ale at ale.org>> wrote:
>
> >Just the simple change from "running this may destroy your
> >monitor" to "it just works out of the box" for X is huge.
> Much of this was due to the change of ISA bus to PCI bus and the associated changes to the functionality of the hardware.
>
> There was not much information handed back when the CPU probed a card on the ISA bus, so you had to edit the config file to supply that information.
>
> The monitor being destroyed was mostly due to lack of power limiting circuitry. As the scan rate increased more and more power was pulled through the circuitry eventually heating it up to flames. This happened more times after the monitor was separated from the system it was designed for and was paired with other controller boards which would attempt to drive it at higher scan rates. Later "multi-scan" monitors eliminated that problem.
>
> md
>
> On Tue, May 9, 2023 at 1:23 PM Jim Kinney via Ale <ale at ale.org <mailto:ale at ale.org>> wrote:
>
> Ah. Old slackware floppy images. Needed 7 to get a working OS plus enough network bits to use the modem and get more.
>
> I LITERALLY learned scripting because my wife would pick up the phone to see if I was online :-)
> I could get 1 floppy per night.
> Now I can get 5gbps into my house.
>
> Kids these days have no idea how much easier things are now. Just the simple change from "running this may destroy your monitor" to "it just works out of the box" for X is huge.
>
> On Tue, May 9, 2023, 10:24 AM Boris Borisov via Ale <ale at ale.org <mailto:ale at ale.org>> wrote:
>
> There is some ancient stuff here:
>
> https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/ <https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/>
>
>
> On Tue, May 9, 2023, 10:07 Boris Borisov <bugyatl at gmail.com <mailto:bugyatl at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> slackware.cs.utah.edu <http://slackware.cs.utah.edu>
>
> On Tue, May 9, 2023, 10:05 DJPfulio--- via Ale <ale at ale.org <mailto:ale at ale.org>> wrote:
>
> On 5/9/23 07:31, Jim Kinney via Ale wrote:
> > I'm gonna look at the v 1.3 I found in their downloads. My testing of
> > it was from '95-97 time frame. Many thanks!
> >
>
> I kept an old Walnut Creek 6-disc Linux collection. Used to buy $15 updates from Microcenter every 6 months during most of the 1990s.
>
> Can probably find a Slackware 0.96 disc somewhere here. I didn't have a CDROM at the time, so I'd buy 50 floppies and stay late at work to use the CDROM drive on my workstation there to build the floppies from the CDROM.
>
> I was living outside Houston then and it was a 45min drive on Sunday morning to get to the "PC area" of town. It was a full day to head over there and visit NewEgg, Microcenter, CompUSA, and a few others that have long died.
>
> Life these days with Linux is 1000x easier.
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>
> --
> Terror PUP a.k.a
> Chuck "PUP" Payne
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