Circa mid 1990s, I tried to get my hands on Linux and tried to dual boot to a separate hard drive that I bought with chore/spare job money. Boy, did I fuck that up. Rendered both installs useless. Don't recall how, but had to manually edit the partition tables on the main Windows drive. As long as they had that PC, it never did report the correct partition size in several places...but it booted & worked, so I wasn't grounded. Wasn't really until college in 2002-2003 that I experimented with *nix again, but that was with a dedicated 2nd hand laptop running FreeBSD so I could access OSS VLSI tools. What a time...

> But damn getting a modem working in that era was tremendous bitch

And of course help was available on the internet. On dialup. Which you couldn't get working without the modem.

I have fond memories of holding a printed out gentoo install manual and watching windows getting wiped from my box as a kid.

Then the terror of getting the modem to dial from a terminal, using lynx to get some browsing going so i could figure out how to get some GUI going on the thing.

Finally, getting Wine to run CS 1.6 so I could play at LAN parties with my buddies. They all thought I was a wizard because I was running this strange OS.

I genuinely believed that gentoo was going to give my machine super powers because all the software was "compiled and optimised for my machine." Maybe that was a little off the mark, but a great learning experience!

Now everyone has a smartphone, so it's hard to replicate that feeling of being cut off from the net with just a printed manual and your determination to carry you through. Good times!

I think in those days you had to use a terminal emulator of some sort (maybe minicom?) to dial the ISP, then background (without hanging up), then run up pppd. I had no idea what was going on with this process.

Obviously at this stage, a working X was a fantasy. You had your 6 ttys and that was it.

My first linux was redhat 5 from the CD on the back of a book - it didn't support my SIS 6326 card -- funny how I remember what graphics card I had 20 years ago, but have no idea what's in my desktop at the moment other than "some nvidia thing".

According to a post I can still find on usenet: "I got X running in 600*480 but the mouse pointer was corrupt, so they were close, but not close enough."

I assume I was dual-booting with windows 95 or 98 for my first year or so, at least until I got a better graphics card -- a Voodoo Banshee I think. I'd moved to debian by September 2000 though when I went to uni, and a year later when I saw in the Billenium with date running in an xterm.

> Now everyone has a smartphone, so it's hard to replicate that feeling of being cut off from the net with just a printed manual and your determination to carry you through

It's amazing how we used to survive without the sum knowledge of humanity available at our fingerprints.

> getting a modem working in that era was a tremendous bitch

My "hand-cranked modem" story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6576823

> To this day, whenever the network is slow, I twirl the mouse in little circles subconsciously.

I still do this, it's theraputic

Also known as "manually pumping the message loop". I'm almost certain that that program was handling communications events on the same thread as the message pump, and only relying on a very slow timer to move them through. There was probably plenty of such badly-written software back then, because 16-bit Windows was cooperatively multitasked and had no concept of threads.

Related article and discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625957

http://web.archive.org/web/20140105042459/http://support.mic...