Found a distribution even more ancient than Slackware and SLS.

ReaperX7 · 03-18-2014, 11:56 PM

It's historic and unmaintained, and no website even exists, but I stumbled across this little gem of information regarding a distribution known as:

MCC Interim Linux

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCC_Interim_Linux

It was first released to the public in February 1992 by Owen Le Blanc, nearly a full year before Patrick first released Slackware in July 1993 and just months before Peter MacDonald released Softlanding Linux System in May 1992. However an anonymous FTP by MCC made Linux first available in November of 1991.

The only evidence of anything older was the legendary H. J. Lu's infamous Boot-Root floppy disks.

That's just awesome to have found that while doing a random drive through of Wikipedia.

GazL · 03-19-2014, 07:27 AM

I'm not surprised there was no website. Everything was happening in newsgroups and ftp/archie/gopher in those days.

Owen helped me with a noobie lack-of-understanding issue I was having back when I first started some 19-20 years ago. Nice chap.

gbowden · 03-20-2014, 06:32 PM

Found this site with an image of MCC Interim 0.97 that works with qemu.

http://www.manlug.org/?page_id=793

JWJones · 03-20-2014, 06:56 PM

Ya might want to grab Yggdrasil while you're at it!

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-...ons/yggdrasil/

glorsplitz · 03-22-2014, 09:18 PM

I had Coherent running dual boot with Windows 3.1 early 90s, 486/20 4M ram, 100M hd, I know it wasn't linux but it was unix like.

brianL · 03-23-2014, 08:04 AM

The oldest Slackware I've tried was 3.5 with qemu a couple of years or more ago. Managed to get X running OK, but had big problems with the mouse: half-an-hairsbreadth movement caused the cursor to shoot off to infinity and beyond. Couldn't sort that out, gave up trying. Interesting experiment, though.

gnashley · 03-24-2014, 02:02 AM

My first was slackware-3.3 running inside the macbochs emulator on a G3/4 iMac.

bobzilla · 04-03-2014, 10:14 AM

@ReaperX7: If you got time and have a pretty good "search skills", Google still carries usenet archives. There is a bunch of info on early Linux (and x86 BSD) development. I know some people already made the "collections" of the best/most important posts:

http://tech-insider.org/linux/index.html
http://www.informatica.co.cr/linux/index.htm

I have a collection of my own favorites, but that is not (yet) publicly available.

Anyway, I'm glad I'm not the only one interested in this kind of stuff.

Quote:

Originally Posted by brianL

but had big problems with the mouse: half-an-hairsbreadth movement caused the cursor to shoot off to infinity and beyond. Couldn't sort that out, gave up trying. Interesting experiment, though.

That might be because of gpm. The early versions colided with XFree, so you had to use a repeater (/dev/gpmdata) instead of the real mouse device in XF86Config.