The Linux Distributions of 1992

Ahh wow, this brings me back.

I bought, or rather had my parents buy, this exact same package from Best Buy when I was in high school or maybe the end of middle school. I remember thinking in the store that it was impossible for there to be something that wasn't Windows or Mac, and the packaging was so cool.

These were also the "10,000 Best Windows Games" shareware CD-ROM days (anyone remember the Aztech Cube pack? [1]) I was fascinated by the fact that Red Hat came with thousands of "packages" that weren't shareware. And that thicc documentation, wow so sexy. A printed catalog with info on each package. I remember feeling a sense of limitless possibility while flipping through its pages.

Installed Red Hat on a Pentium 1 Baby-AT tower that I picked up from Goodwill for $20. My friend and I spray painted it that summer and I slapped a 52x Creative Technologies branded CD-ROM drive with a cable that connected directly to a genuine Creative SoundBlaster sound card for music CD playback. I remember thinking how cool I was to have a Creative CD-ROM drive working with my Creative SoundBlaster playing Vertical Horizon's "Everything You Want" on Linux. All I needed was a KVM switch to play Civ 2 on my junkyard Win 95 Gateway pizza box sitting next to it.

Wild times.

[1]: https://www.mobygames.com/company/aztech-new-media-corp

I had previously been using Coherent Unix (with the enormous compendium in a thick book).

I was first setting up my home NFS server using NE2000 Ethernet cards to try all that out.

This was all run on a Gateway 386 @ 25MHz which started with 4MB of RAM.

My enthusiasm was powered by the ability to do good by using my cable internet connection to download ISOs in trivial time.

I cut a strange figure at the post office every Saturday sending packages to places like Macedonia.

I was there, and I don't recall that. It all "just worked" in the summer of 93 which was mere months after this article. On a 40 mhz 386dx, a kernel recompile took about an hour with 4 megs of ram so I upgraded to 5 megs using 4 256K sticks (back then simms were 8 bits wide and the 386 had a 32 bit bus, so ...) and then compile times dropped to 15 minutes. X window system worked fine IIRC.

The big problem with SLS is the distribution method was zipped floppy disk images downloaded from BBSes that were basically split up tar files. So the only update mechanism to fix a minor corner of the X window system would be to redownload all the "X" series disk images, then do a complete reinstall of the X window system.

IIRC the A series of floppy disks was about three disks and would boot and do nothing, but it did verify your hardware worked with linux so it was a natural starting point. The B series installed a "complete unix CLI environment" and the C series installed the compilers although you needed to install the K series to get the kernel source. In those days I believe we did not have modules yet so I had to recompile to get the mitsumi proprietary "not quite IDE" cdrom driver, or at least if we had modules nobody distributed that module in compiled format. Also in the pre-PCI era we set our ports and IRQs manually and it was possible at boot to override but most people recompiled their kernel to their local soundblaster sound card settings or whatever. I believe there might have been a T series of floppies which installed TCL/TK.

The superb innovation of Debian was once you got it installed and you connected to the internet you could download deb files and upgrade, perhaps, just perl. Or you could install, perhaps, just the gawk implementation of awk. About half a decade later came apt and you could now upgrade "automatically" over the internet which seemed quite magical at the time.

A big part of Debian in the old days was all FOSS license so its safe to use at work, and the universal OS "everything should be possible" kind of the opposite of the modern debian systemd era "theres only one way we will let you compute, and you'll like it or leave". I don't recall any claims of being bug free or less bugs at all; if anything debian was worse LOL.

It was not clear until the APT era that binary distribution was the way to do linux. In the "old days" if you wanted a fancy irc client you simply ftp downloaded the source and tar -xzf whatever.tar.gz ; make ; make install ; make clean it and it worked quite well.