[Cialug] what distros were out in 1996?

[Darcy Baston]

I just got an old Pentium 200MHz machine, with a 1996 Phoenix BIOS.  
It's got 32 megs ram and an 8 gig hard drive.

Tried to boot off Mandrake 9.2 (works on wife's laptop) : "no  
operating system found" -> BIOS message

Tried to boot off SuSE 9 live CD (works on wife's laptop) : "upgrade  
your bios" -> SuSE message

Managed to boot and install OpenBSD 3.4 (works fine on year 2000+  
computers I've tried it on), but it can't find /usr/bin/sh when it  
boots, so I have to manually make it load csh instead (at a #  
prompt). I can see it in /usr/bin when I'm ls'ing around, but the  
file system gets mounted read only anyway so I can't even create a  
user account, get a login prompt or anything.

So now I'm open to see what else I can try and what's easier on me.  
I'm too much of an amateur to get going on OpenBSD. Was Redhat the  
way to go in 1996? Where can I get 10 year old distros to try? What  
do you think is wrong with the BIOS that SuSE and Mandrake won't  
boot? Thanks!

warm wishes,
Darcy