OSNews

My first contact with linux was in early 1992 when I was playing around with a copy of xenix. I was surfing bitnet and fidonet for some info and came upon SLS linux. Interested, I FREQed the files from my bbs.

After about a week or two on the slow node that was dedicated to D'bridge ( I think 2400 baud.) I installed the basic disks onto an old 386sx16 (with a mathco, Engineering major at the time.) I was hooked.

I have distinct memories of calling up compuadd to get the monitor timings so I could run X-windows. Needless to say, they had no clue what I was talking about and as a result, had to buy a new monitor instead of repairing my motorcycle, because I blew up the monitor with wrong timings. I typed startx, heard a loud pop, bad smell and that was it.

At this time I still ran linux as a secondary system. My main system was running desqview to handle the bbs.

In 1993 a friend of mine told me to get my ass over to his place and check out this new linux distro with a COLOR interface, Slackware. For the next day or so, we were in an english lab overwriting the free floppy sets ( 70 or so) that IBM was giving to anyone who would test OS/2. At this point my friend and I made a pact to run linux as our only OS over the summer and we have never looked back.

Within a year, we had the very basics of a dialup/nat server running and I phased out the bbs. Can you say coax ne2000 based ethernet!

Fun times.

dhh