[SGVLUG] Memories of SLS Linux

[Braddock Gaskill]

James was talking tonight about installing an "old" linux distribution for
fun.  It brought me back to my first encounter with Linux, which I thought
I'd share.  Maybe others can share their experiences.

The fall of 1993 was the start of my freshman year at college.  I spent all
the money I'd earned at my first programming job the prior summer on a new
486DX2, even though I had been raised on an Amiga.

MSDOS on the 486 was a bore compared to the Amiga.  The DEC Unix
workstations in the lab were far more interesting.

My dorm-mate Mark had received a big box of used floppy disks from his
mother's work.  We went to the computer lab and started downloading SLS
Linux from MIT's ftp server.  Slowly.  One floppy at a time.  To speed
things up we commandeered half a dozen lab computers at once, looking over
our shoulder in case the campus IT department got mad at our flagrant abuse
of machines and precious bandwidth.  We were sure we'd get in trouble.

One by one we downloaded all 50 floppy disks of SLS.  I still remember the
prompt coming up on my freshly installed 486 and thinking I finally had a
real machine.  Linux was at version 0.99.  There was no ethernet in the
dorm, we had to run SLIP over a serial line.

I only had 4MB of RAM, which wasn't really enough to run X - although Mark
hacked on my computer all night to get the modelines correct to at least
start it up.  The rule of thumb was you could open one window per megabyte
of RAM over 4MB.  The next summer I upgraded to 8MB and could even run
Mosaic - I recall fondly feeling like I had a real workstation.

I haven't stopped running Linux since.  I see there is a vintage copy of
SLS on ibiblio, so maybe I'll give it another try.

-braddock
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