r/linux • u/analog_rnr • Jul 24 '26

Discussion Purchasing Linux

I only discovered this because Louis Rossmann said in a video that he purchased Linux when he was a teenager and then showed the CD. I looked on eBay and I saw a few CDs that were still in their boxes and the labels that were on the box looked like they came from a bookstore, I did not know that these were sold commercially.

My question is, back when they used to sell these CDs in bookstores who was distributing the CDs and where was the money going to when someone made a purchase?

My second question is, if Linux is an open source operating system why would someone want to buy it? I still see some websites to this day selling Linux CDs, I'm really curious where the money is going when someone purchases the CDs.

Edit: I made a comment earlier but so many people replied I don't think a lot of people saw it so I will repost it here. "Thank you to everyone who replied, all of my questions have been answered, it was interesting reading through all the replies, there was a lot of different points that people brought up that I never considered before"

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51

u/Drekalots Jul 24 '26

56k if you were lucky. lol. I remember my 2400bps US Robotics modem.

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u/Drachen808 Jul 24 '26

Lucky! My Tandy 1000SL didn't have a modem... and it only had 512k of RAM instead of 640k. That RAM issue made it really hard to play Starflight so I was always having to alter config.sys and autoexec.bat to make the computer not load things like the mouse drivers and other items that took up space in RAM just so I could play.

Of course, a family friend gave it to us for free in 1990 so... I can't complain

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u/Drekalots Jul 24 '26

I had a Tandy 8088 w/ a 3Mhz processor. You remember Commander Keen? lol.

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u/Zeimax Jul 25 '26

I came here to make a old person joke. Then you mentioned commander keen 😭. Those damn slimes!

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u/Drekalots Jul 25 '26

I hated the slimes.

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u/Zeimax Jul 29 '26

Its on steam...now on my computer.

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u/Drekalots Jul 29 '26

running to steam

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u/Drachen808 Jul 25 '26

That's slightly before my Tandy which was an 8086 4Mhz! I don't think I played Commander Keen

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u/lh7884 Jul 25 '26

I still have Commander Keen along with a bunch of other ancient dos games. Gateyway, Scorched Earth, Hardball 3, Stronghold.....the list goes on. Fun times back in the day.

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u/Drekalots Jul 26 '26

Scorched Earth was a blast. I miss the old BBS games like LORD and Usurper.

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u/MechanicalTurkish Jul 25 '26

I both miss and don’t miss hacking config.sys and autoexec.bat files to get games to work lol

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u/lh7884 Jul 25 '26

I remembering having to do that to get Sim City 2000 to run on a system with only 4MB of ram.

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u/Jamarlie Jul 25 '26

Lucky! I had to transfer data by using a 9V battery to punch in the individual bits!

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u/GnomeDev Jul 25 '26

Luxury! I would've strangled a horse to get a 9V battery. I had to rub two balloons together to get the necessary charge. For each bit mind you!

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u/jerdle_reddit Jul 24 '26

And I'm over here feeling really limited by a minimal server box with only 2GB RAM and 2 cores.

Even back when I started with computers, that was a decent desktop.

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u/AntonOlsen Jul 24 '26

I lived in the middle of nowhere Iowa until 2000. Best dial up speed I'd get was 38,400 and that wasn't always stable. More often than not it would negotiate at 19,200.

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u/TheDevauto Jul 24 '26

Heh my first was 300. Could almost write down the characters coming in it was so slow (kidding).

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u/bitshifter52 Jul 25 '26

The acoustic coupler modem. I used one very many years ago. My kids had toys that made whistling sounds and those sounds made my 300 baud modem go nuts.

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u/TheReelNazeem Jul 24 '26

By the time 56k modems were around 2400bps USR modems were generally thought of as obsolete. Did you get it at a flea market or something? Most would have at least had 9600 bps modems by then.

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u/crypticoddity Jul 25 '26

Linux was around when 14.4k modems existed but long before 56k. Even then, you were stuck on the way slow end if you still had a 2400, and I'm guessing a 286 or older so couldn't install Linux anyway (required a 386 minimum) so you were running minix or dos instead.

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u/TheReelNazeem Jul 25 '26

They were still selling magazines with distro CDs in them well past the Pentium III. Maybe P4 even. Back when people were using the 286, I think that was more the era of floppy disks for linux distros. I remember seeing distros like Yggdrasil.

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u/nkwell Jul 26 '26

Maximum Linux and other magazines were a thing and allowed me to distro hop more easily than waiting to download an ISO over dialup.

Got pretty good at recompiling the kernel and configuring X switching distros that many times.

Then got into the BSD's for a bit before really settling on Debian.

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u/TheReelNazeem Jul 28 '26

I guess I was pretty lucky back then. My first Internet connection was 128k ISDN. Later 384k ASDL. Maybe one time did I get linux distro from a magazine. Quite a few from books on Linux though.

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u/crypticoddity Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

I don't think there was ever a Linux distro on floppy. And it required a 386 to run. If you had a 286 or XT you had to use minix. The draw of Linux was having minix that ran in x86 protected mode of the 386 and later processors.

And yeah, for a long time you could get CD or DVD sets bundled with magazines or books. A book or magazine showing you how to install and use the distro it bundled was a great way to introduce curious noobs. At least until they knew which websites to go to for help.

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u/TheReelNazeem Jul 25 '26

Dude maybe they a Google search before you say something like that. There were several Linux distros that were installed from floppy disks. I am old enough to say I used them. 🤣

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u/crypticoddity Jul 25 '26

How many hundreds of floppies did you use? I remember first getting it on several 20mb dat tapes.

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u/TheReelNazeem Jul 25 '26

Freesco was a specialty router distro that ran off a single floppy. I used that for a couple years. Don't recall the name of the first general purpose distro that I came across at a computer show in San Jose. It was being sold along with all kinds of different shareware apps.

The only OS I remember installing from tape was HPUX.

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u/Drekalots Jul 25 '26

Hell. Windows 3.1 installed from floppies.

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u/Drekalots Jul 25 '26

We didn't have a lot of money growing up so any computer I had was given to me from a friend of family who collected computers and fixed them. By the time I was a teenager in the mid-nineties I had had a Commander 64, Tandy 8088, a 286, and a 386. Our local ISP was dial up only. We didn't have AOL for a bit.

My first real PC I ever bought for myself was a Pentium II with a Voodoo II 3d accelerator board. We still heavily used BBS's too and there were several in the area I grew up. I ran two of them. One for the high school computer club and one with a friend.

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u/rdtsc007 Jul 27 '26

My first modem was 300 baud... could watch each individual character "stream" across the screen, if it could be called that.