I have been looking at this thread for some time but never posted. I know it's in the Slackware forum but I'll contribute anyway...I have a 10 year old HP z800 workstation that I used for several years as my main PC. It ran every Linux version under the sun because I was a big hopper at that time. Spec wise it is in the "these go to 11" realm of horsepower, even to this day: 2 x 6 core Xeons @ 2.67ghz (hyperthreaded so 24 virtual cores), 96G ram, 2 x 300GB 15k rpm SAS drives in a RAID set up. It has been demoted to being a FreeBSD package build server and test web server because I finally decided to build a new system, something I haven't done in over a decade.

I plan to get as much life as possible out of the old z-box: it's still a monster and works great for what I have it doing. It would be a great PC still, but takes about 5 minutes to boot, has an 1100 watt power supply so isn't easy on the electric bill, heats up the room and isn't very quiet.

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I just remembered.... Anyone seen the movie, "Good Morning, Vietnam"? The film is dated 1987, but the setting was, supposedly, Saigon in 1965 (filmed entirely in Thailand).
Early in the movie they are giving Robin Williams' character a tour of the radio station and they stop at a row of teletype machines that are printing out the latest news.
That is the exactly.... pretty close.... to the setup we had... right to the machines being in a hallway and along a wall with windows looking into an office.

Great movie! I am not a young guy but didn't get into tech until the early 90's so missed out on old school tech like punchcards, teletype, etc.

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Which every person performed a death grip for fear of dropping.

For a short while I worked near a Honeywell that had core memory. Kind of cool.

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The actual coding was done on preprinted sheets divided into columns. A machine operator would translate that into a stack of punched cards which were fed into the machine. The compiler spat out a list of errors and the code sheets and printouts were returned to the programmer for correction. It took a couple of weeks to get a program to compile without error. Nowadays you can do it in an afternoon.

I also remember that the computer ran 24/7 because it was a very expensive machine (although I think it was rented rather than bought). So the machine ops had to work shifts. Most of the big jobs were run at night when there were no terminal sessions using up the cpu cycles.

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As a youngster, my first computer programming class was in Fortran. We had several card-punches to use for putting our programs on the cards. The professor said it was not required for the students to number their cards, but he did recommend it --- saying that if you ever dropped your deck of cards, then you would be glad the cards were numbered. Also, he suggested that after the program was designed and one was ready to start punching the first set of cards, that one number these cards 10, 20, 30, 40, and so on. So that if one needed to revise the program and the revision required more cards, there would be unused card-numbers in the area of interest.

For this class, part of the grade for each program assignment was related to how much memory, and how many processor cycles, your program used; less and fewer was better. The final exam was to write a program, and I still remember being ever so pleased to have gotten 105 as the grade for it. There had been no mention of the possibility for extra credit, so I asked the TA how this could be, and he said it was because my solution had used less memory and fewer processor cycles than the professor's solution.

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I still use a rather old EeePC (1005, I think - 10" netbook) as my bedside/travel computer. It has 1GB of RAM, Atom 1.66GHz CPU, a 160GB harddrive and WLAN that plays good with Linux. I use it for light C programming, text writing and as terminal. I like that it's light, small, sturdy and has a good keyboard. Surprisingly, the battery still holds around 2 hours of charge, even more if I avoid using X.

I do have other computers that are slightly older, but they are not used on a daily basis. However, I still print my calendar using that MicroVAX and not an emulated machine.

On a related note: I'm young enough to have never used punch cards, even though in Romania they were still in use until the late 80s/early 90s. On the other hand, the first distribution I used was Slackware 2.3.0, on a 386 with 4MB of RAM

It would be great to see someone install Slackware on a properly old computer and then take a neofetch shot [when I say old, I'm thinking Pentium II or older].

Hard mode: install Slackware on a pre-Pentium computer.

Challenge accepted!
When you say Slackware.. do you have any specific version in mind? I would go with 13.37 for easy mode (P-II) but I'm not sure that would fit "hardmode" machines.

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My 486 is just not big enough (with only 16 MB of RAM) to install a modern day release of Slackware and the one above that already is a Pentium III (and it is running Slackware, although 10.2).

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Good for you! For easy mode, ideally a version that's still supported. But 13.37 if that can't happen.

For hard mode it's your call re the version. If you do manage to do either easy mode or hard mode, do take some nice high-res pics, won't you, of both the fetch/computer. It may warrant its own thread once you've done so, especially if you're going to attempt hard mode.

I have a pentium II I could try it on.. I’ll let you know how that goes.

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Excellent, it'll be interesting to see how different computers perform.

I don't know what any of the business is about 13.37 being the 'easy mode' but I'm going to assume perhaps it's related to compatibility with older hardware?

In anycase I attempted to boot Slackware 14.2.

Heeding the warning that huge.s is mandatory for pre pentium III machines I used that.

Though whether I use it or not the second shot is the last thing seen before the system reboots.

Moving on I found this thread:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...eboots-877721/

I booted with huge.s mem=128M

Progress... then panic!

On to 13.37. It is installing now as of this writing. I'm open to trying 14.2 again if anybody has any suggestions on what can be done to get it running.

Specs:
Intel Pentium III 350mhz
192 meg ram
GeForce FX 5200
Yamaha YMF719E Sound Card

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13.37 installed. At this point I can't run X as the nouveau driver is puking on the geforce fx 5200 this computer has and it doesn't appear that blacklisting it works the same way it does these days.. oh well, I got neofetch and inxi installed so here you go.

This motherboard used to be in service as a firewall of some sort, I bought it off ebay years ago for cheap when I was wanting to revisit my youth a little bit which was on a really similar board.. I believe the same chipset and a Pentium II 300 mhz, that's what I first ran slackware on.

I've got a box of graphics cards lying around somewhere, I might try them out and see if one of those will let me get X running. I'm not sure there's a lot else I want to do with this machine given how low spec it is.. maybe play some classic Doom lol.

It seems whatever Neofetch looks for to determine the OS isn't in place in Slackware 13.37, so instead it displays a blinking tux.

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