notANON

I was reminiscing with uglyman of The Airlock last night thinking back to the first time I tried Linux. It’s been nearly 20 years since I tried Linux for the first time. I was just a kid so I didn’t really understand Unix concepts or what I was playing with but my dad and I had stopped by a shareware store in Bellevue. Back in those days, there were actually brick and mortal stores in this area that near exclusively thrived off of putting shareware on 5.25″ floppies and selling it.

I saw this expensive piece of “shareware” (little did I know). I was on a CD and was $29 if memory serves me.  At the time, we didn’t have a bunch of old computer hardware laying around.  I had a computer and my dad had one.  At the time I was running a Pentium 60Mhz engineer sample that I scored from our local monthly computer swap meet that rotated between Kent Commons, Everett Holiday Inn and Bremerton.  We paid $1000 for that motherboard, cpu and the 16mb of ram on it but at the time it was cutting edge.  I had a full height 5.25″ 1GB scsi hard drive(that we bought USED for $1,000) and of course a cd-rom drive.

The CD we bought was Yggdrasil Plug’n’Play Linux.  I’m not sure what intrigued me about it.  Maybe that it was an alternative operating system to Mac and Windows which were the only two systems I knew.  Maybe the words plug’n’play which even predated the new term coined by experienced MS users, “plug’n’pray”.  Whatever the case, we bought it.  The minimum system requirements were a 386 with 8mb of ram and a CD-ROM.  I figured I had this beat so why not?  I didn’t know what it meant at the time but Yggdrasil was based on a .99 kernel.

The most remarkable thing about Yggdrasil was that it was the first Linux live cd.  Pretty sure the cd wasn’t bootable because this was before the days of bootable IDE CD-ROM’s supported in bios.  Instead, included with Yggdrasil was a boot disk that would load the cd drivers and eventually you would be presented with a boot menu giving you the option to install it or run it live.

I chose to run it live.  It was pretty slow.  It probably took 5 minutes to get to an X windows screen but I remember being blown away that I could run a full gui OS without even installing it.  Ultimately, I played with it once or twice but eventually didn’t have much need for it since I didn’t understand how to use any of the applications(such as vi, latex, etc) and I wasn’t really savvy or motivated enough at the time to get my modem working in Yggdrasil to connect to the internet (through my shell account provider).

My first taste of Linux was brief but it certainly planted the seed for delving into it later with both feet around 1998 when Redhat was maturing.  I’d love to see some comments from anyone who had more experience with Yggdrasil or an even older distro.