Or a 300 baud acoustic coupler!

Damn straight!... you don't know the meaning of slow until you've watched a dumb terminal screen refresh at 300baud.

I've still got my USR Courier stored away in its box upstairs somewhere. Best bit of kit I ever bought. Pity there's nothing left worth dialing with it.

Bring back Fidonet!

Eeee, when I were a lad we didn't have any of these electronical computer thingies. We had to make do using our brains...if we had any...and paper and pencil...if we could afford 'em.
Fidonet? Is that your dog? Has it been kidnapped?

A wave of nostalgia overcomes me. I'm at the Old Mill in Maynard, MA. (RIP DEC) in a timesharing computer room, in the free space between the PDP10 memory banks and the wall...
On most Friday nights, I'm listening to the VAX (secret project) engineers reshaping the world at the local pub, feet on the table, the beer bottles lined up from here to the UK...
Those were the good old days!
OK, I'm way off topic now. True story nevertheless.

Put £5000000 in a carrier bag, and leave it outside my house, or you'll never see Fidonet again!!
--Anonymous

FidoNet is still there

As long as this thread is being hijacked down memory lane, I'll add my two cents.

When I entered adulthood the following did not exist:

Microwave ovens
Personal computers
Public internet
Pocket calculators
Telephone answering machines
VCRs
CDs
ATMs

About half the people who owned a TV owned a black and white model. Most audiophiles used expensive reel-to-reel tape systems and phonographs. Many people who had phones were on party lines. Most people leased their phones from the phone company rather than own.

A delivery time of six to eight weeks was normal for any mail order.

Vacuum tubes and magamps were more common than transistors.

The first "hand-held" calculator I saw was a Heathkit project built by a physics teacher . The calculator was the size of a large shoe box and could perform only four basic functions. No memory recall, square roots, reciprocals, etc.

I used a slide rule, paper, and pencil to perform mathematical calculations. I used a non-electronic typewriter to write formal papers and letters, otherwise pen and paper was normal.

Fountain pens and mechanical pencils were considered elite tools.

My first computer program was typed on a teletype machine and saved to punch cards. My first pocket calculator was a Commodore model costing $180. My first modem was 300 baud.

I still use scrap paper at the side of my keyboard to maintain short-term notes --- a habit formed from decades ago.

Oh my!

@Woodsman:
Reading all this I guess we're about the same age - which I prefer not to reveal publicly

I don't know about FidoNet, but I do recall some local BBS's in my area years ago. I used to dial in with my BLAZING 9600kbps. I also remember when I first got on the interwebs, back in the mid90s, was going on certain networks called 'gopher'. Remember gopher?

I do... I used it the first time visiting a messy back room at the university library, where a guy showed me that he could find scientific documents from all over the world... He explained me how universities were inter-connecting their computers world-wide. It was my first contact with what was / became the internet.

Hi,

We had our access in a closet in the LAB. Library back room that must have been a luxurious setup.

I'll date myself a little. I remember having to program drums to create my format for the damn punch machines. If I was lucky then I could get a cute lady to type my programs. Don't get me started on that damn sorter. I still have trouble typing with these big mitts of mine. I was in wonder when we got the model 360/20 an thought things where looking up. That is until I discovered the Intel 4004 and started my micro journey. Those were some fun days building or rolling your own computer. Let's see ;4004,8008, 8080, 8085, Z80 then we can get into the i86 group. I've been there with a lot of the Intel, Zilog, Motorola and even AMD. I'm not even going to speak of the micro-controllers. Hours that were well spent during my LAB years. Shucks, I forgot that little 6502, was a cheap wonder.

I think my original slide rule is in one of my shops or offices in a drawer. My first calculator was a simple four-banger. Then I moved up to a HP w/RPN, boy it was great not having to carry my tables. Any detailed design would require the refresh cycle for this overloaded mind.

I've got more power sitting on my lap now than I had using a room full of equipment a few years ago. Just think about what we are in store for in the near future.

onebuck, you've got me beat.
During my university days in the 70s I also remember using punch cards to access the mainframe. My first computers that I used at work were 286s running DOS 5.0. Then we got 386s and 486s with Windows 3.1. Egad, they had 4 MB RAM! Dot matrix printers, ftw.
The first computer that I owned was an IBM Aptiva P150 with 16 MB RAM, running Win 95, with a crappy 28.8 mwave modem. The P150 cost $3500 with a Lexmark printer.

To re-direct this thread. I'm very pleased with the direction that current is going in. I anticipate that KDE 4.2x will be fine-tuned and that the slackware team will as usual battle-test all software before it is released as stable.

Well it was fun while it lasted, but yea it is time to get this thread back on track. Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be...

Anyways, I don't know if I just need to read the README or not, but I don't recall Slackware ever offering any support for EFI, and I wonder if there will be a need to add EFI support. I know that macs use that kind of booting process now, and I am wondering when other PCs will also begin to phase out the old way of booting (BIOS) with EFI. It is not a question of if, but when.

Back on track...
I've suffered some hours today trying to do a minimal install on some older hardware. Main problem was hard disk space.

It would be *very* nice if the setup program could tell how much space is needed for the selected packages.
During the install process is tells us the packed and unpacked size, but it would be nice to know in advance...

By the way, there are some other possible improvements for the setup program. I'm not talking about a graphical install (I'm an old-fashioned command-line person), just some minor changes...

Awesome idea, niels.horn. That would take the gestimation out when you're cramped for HD space.
Interesting. I also really like the ncurses set-up program in Slackware. What improvements would you like to see?