[Cialug] what distros were out in 1996?

[David Champion]

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.
> 
> 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!

Mankrake 9.2 would be using a "oversized" cdrom image, which won't boot 
on a lot of cdroms. Once you got booted, 32mb of RAM would not be 
"good". The smallest machine I'm running a modern Mandrake distro on is 
a p2-266 w/ 96mb RAM, and it seems to run fine.

I have my original Trans-Ameritech Slackware from the fall of '94. My 
first linux box was an AMD 386/40 with about 6mb RAM. It was a *screamer*.

-dc