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Comment by outsidein | Hacker News Reader

Remember the days back in 90‘ (Must have been 1994) when installing Slackware distribution on 486 DX from about 15 floppy disks to the internal HDD.

Had running Linux as web proxy until about 2001. Interesting to see that what was quite normal at that time has become to a topic of interest again.

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In 1996, as a teenager, I had a ThinkPad laptop with a 486SX, 4 MB of RAM, and a 3.5" floppy drive. There was something weird about the floppy drive in that laptop that prevented stock Linux of that time from being able to work with it. But I was determined to get Slackware installed. Back then, Linux had the UMSDOS filesystem, which implemented a POSIX-capable filesystem on top of a directory tree on a DOS partition. And there was a DOS program called loadlinn that could boot into Linux from DOS. So I first installed Slackware using UMSDOS onto the DOS partition on my mother's PC, then transferred the linux directory tree from her PC to my laptop. I don't remember if I did that transfer using floppies or a null modem cable. Finally I removed the linux directory from my mother's PC. I did all of this while the rest of my family was away from home, so they never knew.

I later learned that I could add "floppy=thinkpad" to the kernel command line to enable support for the floppy drive in my ThinkPad model. Then I got brave and resized my DOS partition, using one of the free DOS-based partitioning tools available at the time, so I could have a real Linux filesystem.

I went that route on a school PC in 1998. There was no floppy drive, so I installed a Linux distro (also Slackware, iirc) onto the Windows partition, then resized the Windows partition with Partition Magic and used the existing Linux as a bootstrap for a fresh install on its own partition. It was so incredibly magical. No one had any idea I was doing it, and I felt part of the hacker culture :) I tinkered with it for a few of months at least, and eventually was compiling my own kernels, playing with boot/swap partitions, etc. Never got X to work, though.

This comment is very dense with things I used but haven't thought about in 20+ years.

Loadlin.exe wasn't even a terrible solution for dual boot with win9x... I may have even scripted a boot menu in autoexec.bat at some point.

To add a fun story where Linux saved my live. Back in the 90‘ we had a Clipper / dBASE based DOS app used for capturing orders in a call center after TV commercials. In this case a prime TV show to generate donations. Full house with >100 agents busy. Then the Novell Netware server crashed, and was unable to mount the disks.

We managed to switch the users to an older server so they could continue to work. But it first seemed the HDD and files got corrupted and unrecoverable by disk tools from Netware. We thought of using a commercial recovery service, but this would cause delay and cost $$$$.

So I removed the disks from Netware, fired up a Linux PC, connected the HDD to the Adaptec SCSI (Luckily install prior for a CD drive). The file system was not mountable, but something like dd /dev/sdb1 |strings „JJJJMMDD“ discovered lots of salvage records.

This literally saved my ass and the company.

Last year I finally ditched some spare i386 CPU and memory modules (sort of 1, 2, 4 MByte) after getting no response on eBay.

The HP Laserjet 2100 M (PCL and PostScript) is still running. Someone interested into the original PCL Language book which came with the printer?

Be aware that these old HP printers consume a rather large amount of energy no matter whether they are in use or in standby.

Sure. It is disconnected from power 99.9% of the time. I only fire it up when required. For convenience I used a dedicated external network print server (you know, the printer is centronics only, and centronics long ago vanished for thevsake of usb on PCs). This print server consumed about 10-20 watt, much more than the printer which was actually one of the first with power saving / standby.

The print server has been replaced by an usb-2-centronics dongle recently to reduce energy consumption further.

An about 25 year old laser printer running almost flawlessly mechanically, with latest MacOS and Windows 10 OS, supporting PCL6 and PS is a thing. He is on the 3rd toner cartridge (at least 5 years old).

Only needed for rare cases of government mandated written docs like passenger locator forms.

Paper transport has been unreliable almost from day 1 based on dried up rolls and paper.

About the same era I was working on my industry year at a UK computer company. I was mostly working with the spiffy new Pentiums, but had a spare 486 machine to play with Linux. The complete SLS (I think, though it may have been Slackware) fitted nicely onto a box of 3.5" disks (50 in total?)

Downloading it was a nightmare though - there was no TCP/IP connection available to me, but I could use the X.25 based email package. Attachments weren't an option, but you could send email to a file hosting server (funet.fi perhaps?) and it would split the requested file into as many 64K UUEncoded emails as necessary in response. Reassembling them (given the clunky email software I was working with) was a distressingly manual process... but I eventually collated and copied the complete set of disk images to floppy and installed them on the lavish 100Mb drive of the 486.

I also recall the fun (?) of trying to get the right monitor sync info for the XConfig file, and the superstition of `sync; sync; sync` that must have been long out-dated by the time I actually got my hands on this machine (though I did play around a little with the boot/root disk combination before that).

I sometimes feel a pang of nostalgia for all that stuff, but you can take my 1Gb network connection, hidpi monitor, and multi-terrabyte SSDs out of my cold dead hands!

Edit: Afterthought to give a little extra perspective on when this was: Around the same time I signed up for a Beta program on some Microsoft projects and boxed copies (with manuals) of "Daytona" and "Chicago" turned up in the post!

I still sync; sync; sync.

I also ran Slackware on a 486DX. I remember it taking hours to compile a kernel. I upgraded around 98' to a Pentium II and was blown away when I could compile a kernel in 2 minutes!

Yep, I clearly remember it took just about 8 hours to compile a kernel on a 486 with 4MB of RAM. Upgrading to 16GB was a $400 proposition at the time, but when I finally got new hardware, I was shocked to realize this whole kernel-compiling thing was supposed to take minutes.

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