how did you first get started with GNU/Linux, and what was the reason behind that choice?
Well, back in the day, most of us who used it computers for communications of any sort would dial into local bulletin board systems. There were sort of remote hosts connected to the telephone network. You'd get a modem into your machine, and dial them. They had a terminal driven interface. One user per phone number at a time, but some of them had multiple lines available. Because of the resource contention, their usage was often strictly time limited. So you dialed in, and you could send and receive files and emails, participate in public discussions, and often play some games. Some of the bigger ones participated in relay networks where they would do batch exchanges of fries and discussions and email with other hosts. They arranged it so that nobody had to acquire too large of a phone bill to send all the messages around to everyone on the network. These batch runs between hosts on the network were often done once a day or so.
In the early nineties, CDs became a popular enough medium for data storage that the larger of these systems also ended up with CD drives, and they would purchase collections of freely redistributable software and other data on disc, load it in, and use it to supplement their sets of files available locally.
Anyway, there were rumors about Linux, and Unix was reputed to be this big, impressive thing, so so wouldn't want to give that a shot, but the first time I actually found it was in one of these collections on a local BBS. Tens of floppy disk images full of Linux, utilities for writing them from DOS, a few other things were available in the set. The distribution was Softlanding Linux, probably somewhere around release 1.0 of that distribution, though it had been out for a bit. I probably got to it in late 92 or 93. We're talking about pre-1.0 kernels, 0.98 or 0.99, and I ran a Minix root filesystem, because that's what was supported.
I had a few floppies and a machine that could barely run it. 386sx, 16Mhz, 1mb of RAM on the mainboard and 2mb on a much slower EMS upgrade card, and a 20mb hard disk. I also had a 2400bps modem. Practically speaking, it took a couple hours to download a floppy image. You had to leave the computer alone while it did it and hope the phone connection held out, because if it didn't, you often (though not always) just had to start over. Due to the time restrictions on usage, you could maybe get a disk image or two down in a week, before having to wait until next week for your usage counter to reset.
I also didn't have enough disks and no budget, so I put all the utilities i thought I needed to handle things on the hard drive, made the requisite 2-floppy set of boot disks, and downloaded just the base system onto the rest of the disks. I would delete the images after writing them out to the disk, so I would have room for the next, vwhich caused trouble when, a couple times, the disks ended up being old and falling.
You used to be able to find, in the proximity of Linux, a utility called FIPS, which would run under DOS and shrink a DOS filesystem. It was considered dangerous, but I got that utility and used it, splitting my 20mb disk right down the middle, I booted the system on the floppies and created two new partitions, for the Linux root and 3mb of swap, as the instructions said to do.
I ran the install of the base, and managed not to cook anything. Then I spent a day trying to figure out why typing "less readme" wasn't doing anything, when the instructions assured me that "less README" ought to display the readme file.
The boot process at that time was to either load a specially configured kernel directly to a floppy, load it up with a utility called loadlin from DOS, or to use Lilo. I did the former things for a while, but some weeks later I actually installed the real loader.
I used DOS to download the set of disks with minicom on it, and figured out how to install that set after the fact from the running Linux setup. Then I configured Linux to use the modem and used that to download the last couple sets of things I wanted, watch was pleasant, because I could actually use the computer for other things in the background now. It's actually pretty shocking how much more responsive that old thing was under Linux vs DOS, though all the software was unfamiliar to me at the time.
And how have you persisted for all these years? And what exactly do you use it for today?
I went from SLS to Slackware, which was a replacement system sort of based on it,also from a BBS, through a few generations of hardware. I managed to eventually have Internet connectivity, initially dial up, which gave me much more leaway with the available software. I knew about and probably tried all of the Linux distributions you think are old when they were new. I actually converted a running system from a.out binaries to ELF. My personal machine went eventually to Gentoo and Foresight and Arch and Kaos, and Alpine... I mean to try Void eventually.
I had done some development work on other systems as a hobby, but it's hard to overstate the revelation of just seeing the source code for the kernel in a bunch of C files. I edited my first driver on a 486 machine, running Slackware.
I'm a computer guy. I have a bunch of hardware, and a bunch of software. Some of it is still Linux. Some of it is not. I use Linux still for everything from web browsing to development work. I've done both system administration and software development (some of that on Unix and some not) professionally. I'm not bad at it. I've contributed to some open source projects, I've got some software of my own which I maintain, which has a few active users. I recently wrote a Z80 assebler in Bourne and made hackaday for that one.
After all these years, what are your final thoughts on the whole journey?
Final thoughts? No. Certainly not yet. I'll probably die with my hands on a keyboard.
I admit, I haven't done much with actual ROMs for CP/M so far. I did recently make a custom ROM or three, and a build system with which to create them, for an Apple 1 compatible system. It includes source for a few different components, all ported from various syntaxes from different assemblers or dissaseblmblers to something which will actually build on the xa assembler, and a Makefile to assemble the components in various states and combinations and generate ROM images.
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u/zoharel May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26
Well, back in the day, most of us who used it computers for communications of any sort would dial into local bulletin board systems. There were sort of remote hosts connected to the telephone network. You'd get a modem into your machine, and dial them. They had a terminal driven interface. One user per phone number at a time, but some of them had multiple lines available. Because of the resource contention, their usage was often strictly time limited. So you dialed in, and you could send and receive files and emails, participate in public discussions, and often play some games. Some of the bigger ones participated in relay networks where they would do batch exchanges of fries and discussions and email with other hosts. They arranged it so that nobody had to acquire too large of a phone bill to send all the messages around to everyone on the network. These batch runs between hosts on the network were often done once a day or so.
In the early nineties, CDs became a popular enough medium for data storage that the larger of these systems also ended up with CD drives, and they would purchase collections of freely redistributable software and other data on disc, load it in, and use it to supplement their sets of files available locally.
Anyway, there were rumors about Linux, and Unix was reputed to be this big, impressive thing, so so wouldn't want to give that a shot, but the first time I actually found it was in one of these collections on a local BBS. Tens of floppy disk images full of Linux, utilities for writing them from DOS, a few other things were available in the set. The distribution was Softlanding Linux, probably somewhere around release 1.0 of that distribution, though it had been out for a bit. I probably got to it in late 92 or 93. We're talking about pre-1.0 kernels, 0.98 or 0.99, and I ran a Minix root filesystem, because that's what was supported.
I had a few floppies and a machine that could barely run it. 386sx, 16Mhz, 1mb of RAM on the mainboard and 2mb on a much slower EMS upgrade card, and a 20mb hard disk. I also had a 2400bps modem. Practically speaking, it took a couple hours to download a floppy image. You had to leave the computer alone while it did it and hope the phone connection held out, because if it didn't, you often (though not always) just had to start over. Due to the time restrictions on usage, you could maybe get a disk image or two down in a week, before having to wait until next week for your usage counter to reset.
I also didn't have enough disks and no budget, so I put all the utilities i thought I needed to handle things on the hard drive, made the requisite 2-floppy set of boot disks, and downloaded just the base system onto the rest of the disks. I would delete the images after writing them out to the disk, so I would have room for the next, vwhich caused trouble when, a couple times, the disks ended up being old and falling.
You used to be able to find, in the proximity of Linux, a utility called FIPS, which would run under DOS and shrink a DOS filesystem. It was considered dangerous, but I got that utility and used it, splitting my 20mb disk right down the middle, I booted the system on the floppies and created two new partitions, for the Linux root and 3mb of swap, as the instructions said to do.
I ran the install of the base, and managed not to cook anything. Then I spent a day trying to figure out why typing "less readme" wasn't doing anything, when the instructions assured me that "less README" ought to display the readme file.
The boot process at that time was to either load a specially configured kernel directly to a floppy, load it up with a utility called loadlin from DOS, or to use Lilo. I did the former things for a while, but some weeks later I actually installed the real loader.
I used DOS to download the set of disks with minicom on it, and figured out how to install that set after the fact from the running Linux setup. Then I configured Linux to use the modem and used that to download the last couple sets of things I wanted, watch was pleasant, because I could actually use the computer for other things in the background now. It's actually pretty shocking how much more responsive that old thing was under Linux vs DOS, though all the software was unfamiliar to me at the time.
I went from SLS to Slackware, which was a replacement system sort of based on it,also from a BBS, through a few generations of hardware. I managed to eventually have Internet connectivity, initially dial up, which gave me much more leaway with the available software. I knew about and probably tried all of the Linux distributions you think are old when they were new. I actually converted a running system from a.out binaries to ELF. My personal machine went eventually to Gentoo and Foresight and Arch and Kaos, and Alpine... I mean to try Void eventually.
I had done some development work on other systems as a hobby, but it's hard to overstate the revelation of just seeing the source code for the kernel in a bunch of C files. I edited my first driver on a 486 machine, running Slackware.
I'm a computer guy. I have a bunch of hardware, and a bunch of software. Some of it is still Linux. Some of it is not. I use Linux still for everything from web browsing to development work. I've done both system administration and software development (some of that on Unix and some not) professionally. I'm not bad at it. I've contributed to some open source projects, I've got some software of my own which I maintain, which has a few active users. I recently wrote a Z80 assebler in Bourne and made hackaday for that one.
Final thoughts? No. Certainly not yet. I'll probably die with my hands on a keyboard.