Comment by dsXLII | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsXLII | Hacker News Reader

In 1995 or so, I wanted to play with something not-Windows, but wasn't yet advanced enough in my degree to have access to my school's AIX setup. Bought a Slackware disk set, and a BSD (probably FreeBSD, honestly don't remember), took them both home. Slackware had drivers for my weird non-IDE CD-ROM drive, the other one didn't, and it's been nothing but fun since then.

Without Slackware, I would not have learned how to build a web server, wouldn't have learned about UUCP (which thankfully I haven't needed to use in about 20 years)... basically the entire course of my life would have changed.

(Entirely random aside: I returned the opened BSD disks for a full refund. Remember when you could do that without them assuming you copied the disks?)

Thanks for sharing! And glad to hear you are still using Slackware! (which still seems to have drivers for just about everything!) If you recall, where did you purchase your Slackware and BSD disk sets? I recall Micro Center and Fry's Electronics both sold some Linux and BSD distributions on DVDs but I never saw too many folks buying them (then again, this was circa 2010). And that's a great comment about the return policy! I'm curious when the law was changed (unless it was a per-state thing, assuming you are from/in the US).

Also with regards to UUCP, it appears there are some modern uses for it [0]. I have no perspective with regards to UUCP but from someone who used it (if it doesn't bring back painful memories), do you recall what you used it for or what using it was like? Essentially email + USENET newsgroups + FTP wrapped into one protocol?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Current_uses_and_legacy

On my case, we did have access to DG/UX on the student lab, and had Windows NT offered proper POSIX support, I might never have bothered with Linux at home.

It only took about 30 years for Microsoft to accept POSIX matters, regardless of its caveats.

Naturally there were a couple of factors that led to that change of mind.

Back on the subject, I have spent endless hours going through the packages on Slackware, specially GCC, given my interest into compilers.

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