I recall back in 2005 I picked up a cheap Anthon from Fry's Electronics. It came with Linspire 5.

Other than being able to connect to the internet and simple things like that, it was not meeting my software needs, so I wiped the drive and installed Win XP.

The machine really isn't usable these days, because it lacks support for SSE2. Too bad. I was hoping it was at least up to Pentium 4 standards.

My first brush with Linux was around 1997-1998, when I was working IT at local high school. Our university set up a new listserve server for our department. I knew the root login, but got lost when it didn't understand the 'dir' command. I wasn't terribly interested in learning about it at the time.

I don't know what the reason was, but I got interested in Linux around 2001-2002. I learned enough to make my way around the filesystem, install software, set up DNS and email servers, and edit config files. Later, I downloaded Knoppix and used it for file recovery and system testing when troubleshooting the school's computers (they were DOS/Windows).

Within a couple years, I went dual-boot on my office machine, mostly using Linux. Then eventually native Linux with a Windows VM. I also set up an iptables firewall at the gateway to our network, and managed it from my office. "Sweet!"

I've been running exclusively Linux on my machines at home since about 2009. Used mostly for personal data management, internet browsing, and coding. I'm weak on server services, e.g. LAMP, etc., because I don't have much need for them in my home environment.

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Too bad you didn't replace the Linspire with a more productive distro like Debian, Slackware or Mint.

Mint hadn't been invented yet. I did try Ubuntu late 2006 but had the same problem with software. Anyway, I'm using Mint since 2015 and Win XP was good back then so no complaints. I also like Bodhi Linux.

I didn't get to experience this, but if windows was still like this my opinion of it may be different. I've used msdos a little bit and it's not too bad.

Although I've used versions of MS-Windows that ran on top of MS-DOS, AFAIK, Unix dates from around 1973(GA), MS-Windows from about 1985, and Linux from around 1991.

OK, I was thinking of when Unix was announced, not actually made Generally Available.

Unix

I find it very interesting to read about the history of operating systems, and other things like BBS's and the early internet. A friend of mine told me about the time in the early 90's when he was no longer able to access the internet for free. I wish that someone had pointed my interests to computers back then so that I could have experienced these things.

I'm not arguing for who was first, Windows or Linux, because it seems unimportant to me. But there are 2 distinct iterations of Windows, those that have a kernel that relies on MSDOS, and those that don't. Windows NT was first released in 1993 as the first version of Windows that used a kernel that didn't require MSDOS, hence the NT (New Technology) badging, and in my opinion this makes it a distinctly different operating system from the versions of Windows which have a kernel that relies upon MSDOS. All of the MSDOS based versions of Windows were retired in the early 2000's, and as far as I know, some version of the Windows NT hybrid kernel has been used ever since. This would make it appear that the operating system that we know as Windows was first released in 1993.

That being said, Windows NT was based upon OS/2 which dates back to 1987, so we could probably say that the operating system that we know as Windows dates back to 1987.

Something else that I found interesting was "On December 31, 2001, Microsoft dropped support for Windows 3.0, along with previous versions of Windows and Windows 95, Windows for Workgroups, and MS-DOS versions up to 6.22" This seems like an indicator of some kind of major internal shift in Microsoft's engineering and/or marketing strategy.

My first attempted Linux install was Mandrake or Mandriva or something named like that. I purchased a box of 5.25-in floppy discs (yeah, I'm dating myself) from a CompUSA store across the street from where I worked. I took the boxed set home eagerly awaiting what I might experience. When I began the installation routine, I thought to myself...you've got to be kidding me. I didn't take a look at Linux again until a few years later.

I remember when 3.5" floppies first came out, and I remember thinking that first, they're not floppy at all, and second that it was strange that a smaller disc could hold more data.

Thanks for the links in your sig.

Perhaps the Linux was something like SLS because it seems out of place for 5.25" floppies for Mandrake which came out in 1998. I have heard like in 1993 or 1994 there were some floppies of that size for Linux.

I was battling with SCO unix at university, with short file names and no symbolic links. I'd used minix a little, and then I downloaded the 2 floppies of the MCC distro, which had just come out. Disc 1 being boot, Disk 2 being root. Never looked back!

It came on 64 3.5 inch floppies and it took all night!

I remember installing software from 3 floppies and sweating that one was bad. I can't imagine the amount of moisture loss I'd feel at 64!