[Cialug] what distros were out in 1996?

[D. Joe Anderson]

On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 10:18:52PM -0500, Darcy Baston wrote:
> 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.

A whole 32 megs of RAM?  What luxury!  Things start to get
particularly tricky when one has less than that. :-)

I don't remember how much RAM it has, but one of our Stupid
Surplus Tricks[*] involves using a 200MHz box as our
presentation machine at meetings, running KNOPPIX booted from
CD.  Not that I'd recommend that over an install of Debian to
the hard drive, but mention it just to re-iterate the earlier
KNOPPIX comments, and to get a plug in for the riotous hijinx
which grace meetings up here.

As for the subject question about early Linux distros, 

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution

mentions three in particular:

   Early distributions included:

   MCC Interim Linux, which was made available to the public for
   download on the ftp server of University of Manchester in
   February, 1992;

   TAMU, created by individuals at Texas A&M University about
   the same time, and

   SLS (Softlanding Linux System).

   None of these distributions were well maintained, so Patrick
   Volkerding released a distribution based on SLS, which he
   called Slackware; this is the oldest distribution still in
   active development.

I looked into running MCC sometime in the mid-90s, (would have
to have been between 1992 and 1995) but my only personal
hardware at the time was a 286.  I didn't relish the prospect of
facing the wrath of my co-workers should I trash the exisiting
OS installs on our shared 386's.  So, I was scared off from
trying it, and probably just as well.

So, like many here, Slackware was the first distro I ended up
running.  I made a complete floppy set . . . man, that's a lot
of floppies.  But ah, the spartan joys of working with nothing
but a boot and a root floppy.

(*) http://wiki.amesfug.org/AmesFUG/StupidSurplusTricks

-- 
D. Joe Anderson         http://www.etrumeus.com/~deejoe
"DRM [...] is to copyright law as a machine gun on                                          
a motion detector is to real estate law"  -- Don Marti