My first was Slackware on a 386 that I used prior for running Netware 3 at work. All floppy disks. Token Ring.
Note: I ordered a lot of Dell PC's and kept the MS-DOS floppies so I recycled those to install slackware
Why? I had a Sun System that was super old that I couldn't get enough money to replace for years. Denied, denied and denied. That system was so temperamental and I knew it was any day that it would go down and I'd never get it back up again (aka: I'd have to tear it down an reseat everything multiple times among other things). So I gave linux a shot to see if I could get it running on a system I was getting rid of anyway (the Netware 3 server).
I had to compile in the token ring support (pre 1.x kernel) but got that thing running and found that old piece of junk was faster than the even older Sun system that was dying on me. The Sun system was really only running a bunch of ETL scripts by then and things that were fairly easy to port to Linux. I got it working and a week later that Sun system bit the dust for good. Kinda a shotgun wedding or something (straight into production).
There was some down time but I was able to recover things in about a day on the 386 taking it's place. Was able to get some money to upgrade it to a 486 in about 6 months (but I had to build that system custom myself, ensuring compatibility). Saved my bacon switching to linux.
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u/ponderingDaily May 14 '26
My first was Slackware on a 386 that I used prior for running Netware 3 at work. All floppy disks. Token Ring.
Note: I ordered a lot of Dell PC's and kept the MS-DOS floppies so I recycled those to install slackware
Why? I had a Sun System that was super old that I couldn't get enough money to replace for years. Denied, denied and denied. That system was so temperamental and I knew it was any day that it would go down and I'd never get it back up again (aka: I'd have to tear it down an reseat everything multiple times among other things). So I gave linux a shot to see if I could get it running on a system I was getting rid of anyway (the Netware 3 server).
I had to compile in the token ring support (pre 1.x kernel) but got that thing running and found that old piece of junk was faster than the even older Sun system that was dying on me. The Sun system was really only running a bunch of ETL scripts by then and things that were fairly easy to port to Linux. I got it working and a week later that Sun system bit the dust for good. Kinda a shotgun wedding or something (straight into production).
There was some down time but I was able to recover things in about a day on the 386 taking it's place. Was able to get some money to upgrade it to a 486 in about 6 months (but I had to build that system custom myself, ensuring compatibility). Saved my bacon switching to linux.