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Comment by akoster | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for sharing! Could you elaborate more? I was unaware there was any Linux distribution that was compatible with anything but 386-class processors?

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Well, technically my neighbor who was a CS prof. helped me out and I was 12 years old so I can't really elaborate a lot. He really wanted me to use Linux and gave me that laptop and I started programming in Perl and C - just tiny programs and learned the basics of Linux. I remember him helping me out with the install and it took quite some time but that's all I really can say about it.

Honestly, now that I think about it, it might have been a 386 but I was entirely sure it wasn't. Memories are weird.

Thanks for sharing! I take it that was a hand-me-down laptop? My first PC I could call my own was a hand-me-down 6-year-old Toshiba Tecra Pentium II laptop with a 5GB IDE HDD and 192 MB of RAM running Windows 98 SE I received when I was maybe 10. I wish I would have installed Linux or had a compiler handy to learn how to write "real" software (as opposed to Logo in a MicroWorlds Pro environment), though eventually I discovered Linux from a friend's dad recommendation to try Fedora Core 6. IIRC it was painful downloading the ISO(s) over a 512kbps DSL connection, which had a copy of GCC!

This was my second computer, I had a Compaq Presario Pentium 75 mhz that ran Win 95 and later 98 SE. The laptop in question was a hand-me-down from the neighbor and it had a white-black screen so instead of it being a black screen with white text it was reverse. A very strange "little" computer that my mother sadly threw out when I moved out many years ago. This was in the 14.4kbit modem days and I think it was an actual copy of Slackware 3.1 on diskettes.

But as I said, my memory is very sketchy. I just remember the good times I had fiddling around with that thing.

Thank you as well for the good talk!

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