[TriLUG] Fwd: Organize a Debian Birthday party in your city

[Scott Chilcote]

On 08/14/2012 09:17 PM, Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Aug 2012, Paul Boyle wrote:
>
>> I remember staying up all night downloading the floppy disk sets at
>> approximately 1 Kb/sec.
>
> 3 guys who booted from floppies
>
> Joe
>
In '94 I decided to try Linux, after just having gotten a job offer to
move here.  To save time I let my fingers do the walking through the ads
in the back of Linux Journal, and ordered a 100 MHz pentium box with SLS
pre-loaded.  So I don't qualify as a floppy-loader, unless you count
previous experiments with Minix <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix>
(several dozen floppies), MiNT <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiNT> for
the Atari Platform, and going back a bit further, to Microware's OS-9
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_9> on the Tandy CoCo.

Bringing this back to Linux, let me point out that all of these were
pre-emptive multitasking operating systems with very Unix-like
environments.  If you were willing to depart from the well-supported
road and load your own OS, you could play with a lot of cool tools in
the pre-Linux years, including the full suite of GNU freeware. 

It helped me get through college, and made software development my
primary field - which it would not have been if Microsoft was the only
choice.  I have a lot to be thankful for when it comes to free and open
software, and I hope that we all realize how lucky we are.

     Scott