I still remember the first time I commandeered our one and only phone line for an entire weekend to download the Slackware ISO. Version 7, if I remember correctly? My parents were pissed.

I was so excited to have a "real" C/C++ development environment for free, after years of using a pirated version of Visual Studio. I installed Slack, and within 45 minutes I had totally hosed the system and had to re-install. Then I did it again and again and again... those were the days :)

I did the same thing with Slackware 7. I remember downloading Linux 2.4 the day it came out on my Windows machine which took over 8 hours on NetZero dial up. I then compiled it on my Linux machine which took over a day. It was still running when I went to (middle) school and returned. I completely hosed my machine but I've learned a bit since then. :)

At 12 years old, how did you end up finding out about it so early?

It was included on a CD-ROM of a computer magazine. I guess back then they'd include anything to fill 650 megabytes.

Also, in a city nearby, one store had a lot of the Walnut Creek catalog on offer. So, it was fairly easy to get hands on Slackware Linux and FreeBSD without an Internet connection.

At 13 I was interning at our local newspaper and they were running 0.91 beta kernel of Linux on the machine that extracted data from a PDP-11 (via serial) and parsed it for saving to the Mac's for QuarkXPress. My first Unix experience was debugging parts of that system for a new version of Quark.

Sniff. I'm old.

I was a pre-teen as well, using 0.99pl circa '92-93ish (fuzzy memory). I heard about it from IRC. At the time I was using a 2400 baud modem to dial up into Rutgers (an older friend's college account) to get a terminal. Rutgers supported SLIP so that you yourself could become a node rather than just getting a terminal. I wanted to try this so that I could use virtual terminals to IRC and still do other things and generally be more stable than trying to use DOS with a SLIP packet driver. So, it took a while to download a 0.99pl distro onto 3 floppy disks and even longer to get it working with little or no documentation, but in the end it was worth it!

(Not parent, but happens I found Linux at ~12 anyway, so here goes...)

First brush with Linux, a friend had actually bought (yep) Linux-Mandrake (want to say 7.2ish?), and I simply kept bugging him until he lent me the discs. After that Red Hat (came in a book), then Knoppix around 2003-4 ([ab]use of my HS computer lab's cable line). Got a laptop for b-day senior year, that got Ubuntu (abuse of neighbor's wifi).

I had my first contact with Linux around the same age. I had nerdy friends. (Don't know where they got it from in the first place. Probably nerdy parents at some stage.)

For me it was Suse 6.4 at 13. Fine memories. I guess it was because most of my friends were nerds too.

We did have the Internet and dial ups back then you know...

...back when usenet and gopher were king and you could telnet places still...

...and spam was about new Sun Sparc equipment.

Wish I could get back my SS2 with Wietek CPU and 2x 200Mb disks running SunOS4 :)

Most people in the Netherlands didn't, where the then telco state monopoly charged 25 guilder cents per minute for calls.

Ouch that is really expensive. Was approx 1/8 of that in the UK at the same time with our state monopoly (BT)

So your comment here just got inserted back into the story? I'm not sure if I've seen that happen before

Weird! :) Me neither.