I started with Linux with Slackware. Do you know why it was published in 'sets'? If you were lucky, you could download them over a modem before your session timed out over Xmodem! Then Zmodem came along and life was wonderful--big file downloads would reconnect without totally restarting. A lot of candles got lit, let me tell you.

Slackware kept its installation model, which now seems tedious and much too interactive, but that's the way it was done.

You wanted to run Xwindows? Great! What's the model of your monitor? What's the model of your video card? Look 'em up for the timing strings to plug into your startup files. Without the right settings your screens would wrap a quarter way around, or you'd get high-speed hash. Stories went around that if you _really_ got your settings wrong, you'd burn out your monitor. Talk about virus bait...

Red Hat seemed to take over the market. Then things got complicated, and Ubuntu started another big fork. I'd like to find out who automated startx to buy them a beer or 24.

The last thing I worked on hard-core was an in-house Snort installation that wrote text and graphical daily reports to a hand-tuned http page that was available from anywhere in the house. Big stuff, back then.

I don't care who reads it. APL and Perl are incestuous love-children. Go ahead and prove me wrong. I dare you.

I bought a 300-plus buck laptop to get back into the game. I want to run RDP, SSH and web management through it. I'm gonna miss my Textpad editor, but I'll live. Don't you DARE point your EMACS at me or I'll get medieval on you. Can you spell EDLIN? (EDLIN is ED backwards.)

Welcome aboard.

Vi all the way!
I started with Slack; tried RedHat 4.2 & Debian 2.1; stayed with Debian & Debian based, but don't like systemd, so am waiting on Devuan project to take over from Debian.

Interesting about why the sets. I don't think I ever had the patience to download Linux by phone. I bought it on floppies at Egghead Software just like all software.

I think you're being unfair about APL. I'm pretty sure it was a joke by a keyboard manufacturer.

I also worked for a monitor mfg. and you are quite correct that old monitors could be damaged by too high scan rate. Cooling the coils and CRT were a challenge for high refresh rates.

Welcome!

Yeah, monitor used to get fried for incompatible resolutions as well as higher refresh rates. VESA resolutions was the default and safe. I remember that after fork from XFree86, Xorg supported configuration less X Windows.

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