I first ran Linux when a friend[1] at college gave me the boot&root floppy disks. I think it was the 0.96c.2 kernel and I remember being impressed that the "install media" (it was a distinctly manual process) were smaller than my slim paperback copy of "Portable Unix."
A year or so later, with high bandwidth connections in the UK still a bit thin on the ground, I downloaded the full 100 disk SLS distribution at work (a satisfying brick of disks).
The process was amusingly convoluted: using ICL's X25 email client I would email requests to a mail responder on one of the archives (funet I think?) for 64k uuencoded chunks of each disk. Then I saved the email, trimmed the header/footer garbage, stitched it into one file, decoded it to a binary, copoed it to a floppy, and repeated. It took about a week.
So just so you kids know, before you get off my lawn, I <3 'sudo apt-get dist-upgrade' :) It did used to generate a little cameraderie amongst us experience scarred afficionados though!
A year or so later, with high bandwidth connections in the UK still a bit thin on the ground, I downloaded the full 100 disk SLS distribution at work (a satisfying brick of disks).
The process was amusingly convoluted: using ICL's X25 email client I would email requests to a mail responder on one of the archives (funet I think?) for 64k uuencoded chunks of each disk. Then I saved the email, trimmed the header/footer garbage, stitched it into one file, decoded it to a binary, copoed it to a floppy, and repeated. It took about a week.
So just so you kids know, before you get off my lawn, I <3 'sudo apt-get dist-upgrade' :) It did used to generate a little cameraderie amongst us experience scarred afficionados though!
[1] jcday are you out there? I owe you one! :)