The Linux Distributions of 1992
I recall being in a B. Dalton Bookstore in the mid-90's. I picked up a book that had "Linux" on the cover. In the cover it had a floppy disk or two. Something felt very wrong to me. You can't give away an entire operation system! Perhaps this was just some "free for educational purposes" thing? I went home and fired up WebCrawler on AOL and came across Yggdrasil. I had experienced Unix on an SGI system. And I was very familiar with AmigaOS, so this idea of a free Unix-like OS that I could install on commodity hardware was intriguing. A friend of mine bought the RedHat 5.2 distro from Best Buy and offered to let me borrow the CD-ROM. I was like, "that's piracy... no thanks". He said, "no, dude... you don't get it. It's free.".Looking back, I sometimes think. "How could you have been so into computers and NOT known about this???" Then I remember. Information just didn't travel as freely in those days. It was simply possible not to know things. Even though I read computer magazines, they were VERY focused on Windows or Mac. Once I found a distro I could install from floppies (Dragon Linux I think) I messed around until I got X running. Then it was CD-ROMs from CheapBytes and LinuxMall. In 1998 and 1999 I bet I installed every distro one could buy for 2 dollars on CD-ROM! I was a full time user. I have been ever since.