Wow this brings back memories. Spending all night downloading the distro to a stack of floppies over a slow dial-up connection, trying to figure out all the options (and almost always choosing the default), making a custom kernel, waiting hours to compile it--I loved Slackware.
Those speakers bring back memories. I remember the same design being sold under a few different names, but their worst "feature" was they would occasionally somehow pick up frequencies from passing cargo trucks. You'd be laying in bed at 2 AM and out of nowhere, full volume, it sounds like a truck driver is in your room shouting about rest stops.
I'm not that far in. at that time, I was 12 or so. but my PC was a 386DX 40Mhz with 4 MB ram and 2x 40MB MFM harddrives, one 1,44MB 3.5" drive and one 5.25" 360KB drive. even just the idea that 1.44 MB got you somewhere now is somewhat mindblowing. the smallest compact flash I still have is 8MB. even that is ludicrously small, when my current digital camera is very comfortable with a 32GB SD and my laptop has 64GB ram. and regarding linux, a while ago, the most extreme part I learned was: besides real breaks where hardware is no longer supported, even really old linux installations can run with really modern kernels. I read about somebody who ran a "modern" kernel (5 years ago) on an old pentium or so. of course, you need to have the proper amount of ram. I have no clue where the next 10 or 20 years will go. but currently, everyone is a bit too cloud-crazy in my opinion. cloud OS also means to give up on running programs independently.
Me and 3 friends got access to a computer lab at my university, we broke up and downloaded an image on something like 20 machines. We finally found a use for those AOL disks! We then spent DAYS getting the system to work. Slackware was amazing for the time, but I'd never return to it. I'm running Kubuntu now. Yeah, I know it's a copy of CDE, but it does't suck now, although it took a good 20 years. What a nightmare of difficulty.
Yeah, takes me back. I didn't try Linux until five or six years later, and I remember that X still took a lot of configuring. Slackware doesn't look a lot different now, which is nice.
Yeah a guy who says DIS instead of THIS, huh? That's what you want? Get off my internet. This is an AMERICAN website - not a FOREIGN website, FOREIGN. No FOREIGN. That's a BAD FOREIGN.
This was exactly my computing life in the early 90’s. I had a home built 386 dx 40 running Slackware. This was before kernel modules so I was constantly reconfiguring and recompiling kernel. Kernel compiles took all night!
I was thinking the same. I had a 486dx30 with 4mb memory and 120mb HD, but my set of addon boards were exactly the same, down to the crappy proprietary single-speed cdrom drive. I was curious about everything back then, and slackware was one of the "shareware" cdroms you could borrow for free, very exciting stuff.
I think I'd rather commit suicide than recompile a kernel again. Thank goodness for modules, and Linus opposed them. Modules are SLIGHTLY slower. I initially opposed them, but I'd never recompile my kernel again to integrate. Getting X to work, oh, what a nightmare that was.
With OSS and volunteer development, most of the times "good enough" is all you'll ever get. And an aesthetic redesign of an installer is a LOW priority.
Oh, the memories. A 386SX16 was my first PC, coming from the Commodore64 and Apple II Plus. All the hardware you've got there was the de-facto standard for DOS gaming back then. Thanks for sharing!
Slackware 1.1.2 was my first exposure to Linux, my buddy and I had picked up a copy while in HK. We were both HP-UX sysads and thought it would be fun to play with. Getting the GUI to work was always a challenge in those days, but really turned us all into hardcore geeks :) Been using some type of Linux ever since. Thanks for taking me back, many very fond memories from those days.
That brings back many memories. I still can remember that I downloaded those floppy images using our dial-in connection (I was working as electronic engineer with 17 man personnel at a recycle company that repaired discarded consumer electronics and resold that stuff as second hand). It was my first experience with Linux. Funny side note: By using Linux I got used to more non-Windows environments (well - I used RiscOS on the Acorn Archimedes before using Windows, but that's a whole other story), that was helpful when I learned Novell Netware. I have worked as installer and administrator for Novell Netware (from version 3.11 to 5.1) for a while, before jumping to a UNIX/Windows environment. Good old times! After getting tired of grabbing stuff together and long downloads I switched to in-box distributions. Red hat was a bit too expensive, so I opted for S.u.S.E 4.2 (now openSUSE) and the later versions after that. When I got a demo of Mandrake Linux, I got blown away by the (by that time) great installer and desktop and started using that distribution until it "faded out". Nowadays I am using Linux Mint (LTS version) with the Cinnamon desktop.
I’ve used linux briefly on the desktop using the RedHat 5/6 timeframe. I then switched to windows and macOS cause that was used in the workplace and I could not be bothered with OS incompatibilities in a team. I only use Linux now in backend / cloud environments, just the basic shell stuff. But with the move to more server-less architectures and cloud native solution, I am excited to see what will come next..
0:19 Holy crap! An old Mitsumi single-speed CD-ROM drive! That was the first CD-ROM drive I ever purchased, in 1993, as a sixth-grader for my 486! Man, I thought I was the king of the world with that thing. I've never seen anyone else have one just like it.
I am actually amazed the most by that weird top loader CD-ROM drive. Seeing vintage computers, Windows 3.x and early Linux versions is fun but this thing really was my personal highlight. Even more so than you guiding us through the setup of X
Ooh this brings back memories. So much time spent at the local college, downloading and writing slackware disks for the various software groups, only to come back home and find one didn't work for some reason and waiting for the next visit to the computer lab to try again.
Yeah, memories. Last floppy distro I used was 42 floppies - took some iterations between school and home until all worked. CheapBytes certainly provided a welcome service...
Ahh this brings back memories! In high school I had an IBM PC, upgraded with a no-name 386sx40 motherboard in it, with 4 megs of RAM and a 40 meg hard drive. I too ran Slackware on the machine, installed from floppies. Coming from a System 7 Mac, it was refreshing to have protected memory! I'd been learning C on the Mac, and bad pointers would often just crash the whole machine. Not so with Linux! :D
This is wonderful to see again. Pretty much exactly how I got started, with Slackware 1.1 on floppies. Spent all of christmas 1993 exploring the whole new world that was Linux. :) Luckily I had a beefier machine than yours (486-50 with 16MB RAM, Tseng ET4000) so it ran really well. Later on I discovered Walnut Creek and wow, they were so awesome. Still got my first CD sets of Slackware 2.0 and a FreeBSD from the same time, somewhere.. That was truly an exciting time to be a computer nerd. Finally, we could have the massive power of Unix, at home, on cheap hardware! Completely unheard of. I feel privileged to have experienced this journey from the early days. Thank you for the flashback, this was a really good watch. Please, more retro Linux. :)
Still lots more linux distributions to look at :) And might also try it on my beefier 486 ... But do want to find some 4MB sticks for this one so I can bump the memory.
I'm gutted I got rid of my boards. I had over 350 boards, graphics cards, memory, sound cards, motherboards, floppy drives, hard drives collected since I was a student in college.. Sold the lot for £90 + £20 postage. But I kept my 386 with everything working. I even have a 486 dx 2 upgrade inside it. Fantastic machine and I love typing on the traditional click keys. Thanks for your video it made my day
Should have sold it to me :) Yeah these things take up a lot of room ... have ton of stuff here and it's always a fine line to walk on with the misses ..... the rule of thumb is that I can do whatever I want as long as it stays out of the living room, kitchen, hallway, bathroom, bedroom, guest room, laundry room, toilets, .......
So amazing, I'm very grateful for show to everybody this old-school system installation, I'm 25 years old and I'm so excited for complaining how the tech has grew up across the time! You rock!
I have a DecPC DX486 from 1994, I am running Slackware 3.0, linux 1.2.13, not the oldest diestro I have ran, but works well. System is used daily as an X widows front to my pi cluster
lol! "darkstar" - yeah, that brings back the memories. Slackware was my gateway to EMACS, and all the joy it brings. If I remember, there was EMACS for the terminal, and EMACS for xwindow; you had to make a floppy set for each to do the install to get both.
That CD-rom drive is epic! Remember our first CD-Rom drive which was a 5 speed philips IDE drive from around 1995/1996 in our 486 at the time. Those where the days of multimedia awesomeness! Just like “Van Kooten en Bie’s Adventures of the White Cleck” sketch. You must be pretty patient with that early linux install, some Dos games still make me want to pull out my hair if something doesn’t work.
oh shit, the flashbacks, I remember I attempted this back in the day on a 486 but with Slackware 3 or 4, of course not all the floppies worked so I had to mount a cdrom on another computer over nfs using a hand made PLIP cable my dad helped me to solder, all this in order to install my first Linux system, it took me about 2 weeks but I learned more about computers and networks in those 2 weeks than I have ever in my life, I keep Slackware deep in my heart and used it until version 7, thank you for this video, it made me remember the good old days!!
6:08 “Lesstif” - that was an open-source (GNU?) implementation of the OSF Motif GUI, aka “CDE” (“Common Desktop Environment”). I think that was the one that introduced the concept of multiple virtual desktops.
Motif is a look-and-feel specification and the Motif libraries implemented this specification. Lesstif is a free, clean room, implementation of this specification that aimed to have an API that implemented the same API that the Motif libraries implemented. CDE was a desktop environment that used Motif. The relationship is the same way that KDE uses Qt.
AH! Linux! Here we go! 4 years after, back in 1997, I installed my first Linux distribution, Slackware 3.2.... And then Debian, and Mandrake Linux, and RedHat Linux.... Nowadays, I use Ubuntu Linux... Pretty happy with this penguim!
I follow you sir.... I started with Linux in 1995. Went to and from Linux or Dos or various Windows versions. Ended up switching to Linux full time in 2016. Basically learning Linux from 95 to 16. Made it extremely easy to switch fully. 😁😁
I remember first hearing about Linux in high school. My first experience was installing Red Hat 6 on a Pentium 133. I think I got everything working but networking support... but I recall that setup being a lot more guided than what you went through to get this up and running!
Angela Walker - by that time, installation was indeed a lot easier-especially with Red Hat. Slackware required some hardware knowledge properly configure.
Yea, that's cuz you went with Red Hat. Great documentation, great support! As the nerd I was, I bought this with birthday money for my 14th birthday :)
Red hat 5.2 was the first "hands off" 😜, distro I remember Installing and work right out the box with X and all. It was great. After a while I got on Slackware for a while just for the learning process. Nice memories 😃
Slackware was sort of the Arch of the day. It was pretty easy to install, but it did dump you onto a shell and configuring anything was up to you. But it was clean and out of the way. The downside was there was no way of automatically updating anything. Packages were just tars that you extracted onto the filesystem.
I grew up around when these type of computers were just leaving circulation [was born in 99'] we still had one but don't think it was used much. I always think "Man the 90's weren't that far off, it's only been like 12 years since then!" Then I realize it's somehow 2020 and almost 24+ years have passed lmao Time really flies by.
In 1995 I did my first Linux install, exactly like this! 11 disks. And I installed it on my brand new 486. What a joy! I had used Minix but this with XFree86 was a step up.
@@RetroSpector78 I know right! I had an DEC Alpha in 1997/1998 and started to recompile and port apps to 64bit. It was educational and extremely frustrating.
I didn't use minix until well after I was comfortable with linux.....minix was cool though....1,44 meg root partition, and you installed everything from tgz files....it was dead simple, dead effective....and lots of fun....still remember building NCSA(early httpd) on my DEC minix server....and setting up a perl powered chat site...
I had a computer just like that back in the early 90s! When I built it I was running OS/2 Warp. About a week after the install I read an article about Linux with an add for the Yggdrassil Linux Distribution (on CDROM). I have been running Linux as my primary OS ever since. Except now it's Linux on a Hades Canyon NUC, OS on NVMe, home and backups on a QNAP.
That PC is so similar to my first one, back in 94, same RAM, Video and 40MHz 486SX, Slackware was the first Linux distro I installed, so it took me like a month to download that via dial-up in pieces. A lot of memories, nice video.
@@RetroSpector78 Oh, man. I had 32MB of RAM on my AMD 386DX-40 back in the day, with I think 256K of cache as well. It was a great machine, with SCSI hard drives and CD-ROMs, and a 2MB ISA video card.
Fantastic! This video takes me all the way back to my first experience with Slackware. In those days I was also installing Netware 3.12 at the office from about 21 diskettes. What a thrill that was. ;-)
Linux used a.out until kernel 1.2. In Slackware 3.0 ELF compilation was the default setting and somewhere starting 1.2.x they switched to ELF. Older versions of the kernel could not be compiled using ELF so you needed to change Makefiles
The ELF switch was actually part of a major Unix-wide change starting with SVR4. It replaced both a.out and COFF, but the last wasn't noticeable on Linux, so I didn't learn about it until Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_and_Linkable_Format
same here .... only it was an amiga 500 without hard drive :) difficult to compare obviously, but I only got my first PC in 1997. Before that it was Amiga, Commodore 64, Philips MSX .... Never had a 1200, but remember looking at those magazines from the UK and lusting over these amiga 600 / 1200 / 4000s .... were so far out of reach. Picked up an amiga1200 last year and only turned it on once so far ... a shame ... need to create a video on it I think :)
@@RetroSpector78 C64 was my first computer... but A500 was my first love back in 1988. I grew up with it. I own a kickstart 1.2 chicken lips with hi-tek keyboard, and last week i installed a 1Gb SCSI hard drive that worked flawlessly on it. That's insane! Wonderful machine. You definitely have to make a video (or a series) on it!
I got my A1200 + 80mb HDD in 1993 :) Before that I had A500 and Oric Atmos (Close to being Commodore 64). Later I had 68060 and 16mb on that A1200. Amiga's demoscene was amazing. Calling to BBS with your modem to get the newest demos and intros was great fun. I also used WWW on Amiga 1200, but I cannot remember which year and with which accelerator card. I also remember one of my friends big brother using Linux in 1993-95. I remember because it was a big deal here in Finland, as Linus Torvalds was Finnish. I was too young at the time, so I only got into Linux in 2002, and completely abandoned Windows in 2016. Now being novice Gentoo user =)
@@RetroSpector78 it was needed i had a tv tuner i remember that i wanted to work also i could remove stuff i didn't wanted back then it was needed unfortunately
Man, I love that kind of pc case, that on off switch it's amazing; in the early nineties those were popular where I lived but I couldn't afford it, and now it is almost impossible to find one. Great video.
Thank you so much! Brought back lots of memories! At 22 yo in 93/94 I downloaded 25 Slackware floppies, via dial-up, from a local Mustang bulletin board in Fort Lauderdale. The Internet did not yet exist and I remember Windows 95 being announced in the news as the Chicago Project; DOS was king back then. I realize now that I am fortunate to be one of the first geeks to install one of the first publicly available Linux. I set it up on a malfunctioning Compaq Deskpro 386SX25. I remember using the Mosaic browser on dial-up. Later I used the Linux machine as a shared print server and it worked great for the entire office. Novell Netware was then the preferred networking software using IPX (no TCP/IP) and 10BaseT network cards. Those were the days. Thank you for the flash back!
@@fulkthered Didn’t need to. If you could make and receive phone calls, you could connect to USENET. It was actually a separate thing from the Internet.
@@fulkthered Hey, I remember my first experience with Usenet on 1993/09/278, and I lived in a pretty middle of nowhere area. Edit: That is NOT a typo. I really did mean 278 Sep 93.
oh my god that soundblaster pro was my precious when i finally got one, omg that mitsumi singlespeed, that came with its own controller card. good times.
I used Slackware until recently (well over 20 years). A lot has changed with Slackware but it still installs the same. What I really like about Slack is that it expects you to know better and not assume that you don't. :D I recognize all the hardware, especially that gorgeous Model M keyboard (I own three of them). I'd recognize that sound anywhere! Thanks for a great video (from a guy who can still listen to a modem negotiate on a phone line and tell you which speed it's working at)!
That case looks very familiar. I built a 386 system from a box of random parts which were gifted to me, and used that box as a firewall for my first home network. That network used BNC connected coax to share a single 56k modem between 2 computers.
I had a fascination with running modern linux on older hardware and read a nice post about a guy who'd gotten modern linux on a 486, but running period linux on period hardware is just the kind of content I didn't know I wanted until I saw this video, nice.
You need to put these things in context. I’m not one of those retro purists that think you can or should still do something useful with a 386 or 486. I like the nostalgia and making videos on them, but I don’t do anything business critical on it :) I do enjoy playing some games on old hardware and fiddling around with old software but that’s it :)
@@RetroSpector78 Oh of course not, I sure hope that the guy who got gentoo running on that 486 wasn't going to try and use it for work! :P I did see at some point during the video a disc with Doom for Linux advertised, I'd never seen that port on real hardware before, think you could do a video of that running on the 386?
ripper253 doom on a 386 is a no-go, even not in msdos. Tried it in virtualbox on slackware 1.1.2 and that ran fine :) think I will try doom on a 486 or pentium. For the 386 it will be console only apps. Unless I get a 16mb upgrade donation :)
RetroSpector78 oh yeah, the 386 slideshow for DOOM might’ve been tolerable, but you’re absolutely right, running X was already a nightmare on 4mb, I couldn’t imagine shoving doom on top of that as well! Seeing doom on a 486 would be pretty sweet though, don’t suppose you’ve got sim city classic for X as well?
@@RetroSpector78 Yeah, 4M is not the way to go with a 90's Linux. You really need the DX data path and 8M. The machine becomes very usable. I'd compare a 386 DX 40 to a Sun IPX.
My GF now wife loaned me 70$ to buy this pc when i was bored and penniless student. Learn web programming and made tons of money. Good old days. Thank you for making this video!
4 года назад+1
I loved your video, in the past i have thats similar case with same motherboard, running MSDOS and starting my Slackware using loadlin. Thanks for remember.
This brings back memories of running Slackware 2.2 with the 1.2.1 kernel on my P5-90 system in 1995. I had to wait a couple of months for Trident 9440 support to be added to XFree86. I attached my old Tandy 1000 to the serial port with a null modem cable and used it as a second text console.
I started using both Slackware and Debian back in the '90's.. Both awesome distros! Nice to see your retro computer RUclips page running GNU/Linux.. Most retro computer pages here just show MSDOS or Microsoft Windows.. I don't mind that but Linux was also around back then. The early days :) Fun to ticker and try the new Operating Systems :)
Many happy memories of installing Slackware 2.0 from floppy back in the day. I remember not having enough floppies. I had to go to university, download the bare minimum disk sets, install then repeat. Especially frustrating as I had to rebuild the kernel to get my HDD working at a reasonable speed. Thought it very odd that you had to rebuild so much from source just to "install a disk driver" and that Windows/DOS was so much easier... After a brief interlude in Windows/Netware land I've spent 20 years building embedded Linux systems so I hope I learned the error of my ways! ;-)
This video brings so much memory back :-) remember installing Slackware 3.0 on my old 486sx25 back in the mid 90s, looks almost identical. Remember also calculating the modelines per resolution in the xorg config file
Wow. Loving this video. I had a lot of Walnut Creek CDs I would get from my local book and music store. Had Slackware 1.2. Although I didn't get serious into Linux until Mandrake in 2000 because I wanted to run ShowEQ which was a packet sniffer and analyzer for the EverQuest MMO. Before Linux (and not counting DOS and Windows) it was OS/2 for a multi-line BBS.
Ha! Xeyes! My go-to app for testing my X windows install back in the day. I see we have even been spoiled by recent Linux distros. Installing Slackware reminded me of installing ancient versions of SunOS that required all kinds of manual steps related to partitions, disk mirrors, etc.
exactly, however once you get past the partitioning stuff things are pretty smooth sailing in order to finish the install and get up and running. The lack of a package manager and dependency management was a real pain for me .... compiling compiling / swapping libraries in / out .... you were always busy not being productive :) But it sure was fun.
So hard to find content like this, back in the day what would this have done better than dos, maybe windows 3 which is what most 386 machines would have had.
I pulled down the floppy install sets for Slackware over a 19.2kbit/s serial connection while at university back in '95. Took ages, but I managed to get it installed. Used SLiRP over that same serial interface to get TCP/IP up and running. Those were the days!
Have a Redhat 5.2 video on the channel also :) found this installation to be a bit more raw using the disk sets. Redhat 5.2 was a lot more elaborate and cd based and pretty straightforward. Amazing how much of a difference a couple of years brings.
Very nice! Back then I started with SLS distribution, later switched to Slackware and S.u.S.E. The last time I have installed such an ancient Linux was some years ago with SLS on a virtual machine and Debian 2.1 "Slink" on a real 486 machine. That was fun and whilst the SLS needed a lot of manual configuration, Debian "Slink" from 1999 was a big step ahead!
I was amazed at how easy this one went ... fact that it has premium hardware did help a lot. As soon as you needed different drivers and needed to do a lot of compiling things quickly became complicated for most people
Oh man... I have computers from 1968 up until the modern age... But I truly love these 386 age machines. It made so many things possible back then. So I might dig one out and go trough this experience once again.
Slackware was my first Linux. Installed from floppies. I don't remember what the problem was, but It took me days to install and reinstall and configure. Back then my hard drive was a whooping 20 MB. Yes that's 20 Mega Bytes. Thx for the memories.
Probably bad floppies ? :) I had a kernel panic but on the second run it went fine. 20mb is really small yeah ... my smallest hd in a 386 was 40mb I think :)
Slackware was my first Linux distro. I installed it from disks around summer 1995, so it would have probably been v2.3. Literally all my hardware worked out of the box. It was a 486DX4 with 12MB of RAM, and a Adaptec 1542 SCSI controller with SCSI HDD and NEC SCSI CD-ROM. A Sound Blaster 16, 3Com 3c509 network card, US Robotics courier 56K modem, and a ATI Graphics Ultra (Mach8) video card with NEC MultiSync 5FG monitor. The Mach8 is special as by default it emulates the IBM 8514/A video card, which made installation a breeze, and my NEC monitor was also on the list, so I immediately had 1024x768@75Hz without having to really do much. I had built the system myself and picked each part over the years for maximum compatibility and performance. So while my friends were struggling to install OS/2 or Linux, my system would work with anything.
That's some premium hardware right there .... and that's what you needed back in the day ... spent so many nights compiling kernels and modules to get hardware to work ... it was always a pain ... unless you have creative / adaptec / 3com / ......
@@RetroSpector78 I got to do plenty of that the following years, as I got RHEL certified and would get new servers up and running for customers with brand-new network and storage drivers that had not yet been up-streamed. And patching the RH Anaconda installer to support the new drivers properly for network boot and install. Those were the days :-)
This is the same CPU and distribution that I started with. I had an old IBM XGA monitor and it made all kinds of noises when I put in the wrong modlines for xfree86.
My father had a same 386 at work, and this was a dream as I had at home 286 a the time. That mitsumi x1 speed CD is a bit futuristic, but man this is awesome!
Back when the PC featured here was new I hadn't even heard of Linux yet, which I don't believe I discovered until 1995. Even then I didn't install my first distribution until 2007. I was a solid Windows guy until then, but these days I do run Linux Mint as my main OS. I love retro hardware, but I'm not sure how useful it would be today running Linux. About the only thing that interests me to do with such old PCs is retro gaming, and for that era you'd be using DOS. Still it was very interesting seeing the setup. Sometimes half the fun is configuring things.
Exactly ... there is zero practical use for this type of stuff, but it does help to put things in perspective and see where we came from and where we are today. It's also nice to re-produce these things on actual hardware. In a VM it is very difficult to recreate that feeling. By default it takes 5 seconds to compile a kernel in my VM. On this machine it took 20 minutes to do a compile dep :) And you also don't have the sounds of the harddrive, diskdrives, keyboard .....
I remember installing slackware from floppies, I don't remember what version it was but I think I needed about 20 or 30 floppies. It really sucked when floppy 3 of 4 in a set had an error on it lol. Slackware was my go to distro for a long time when I was still distrohopping.
Slackware was my first linux distro . I had 486dx 16 mb of ram , then my teacher gave The Redhat CD as computer grows on power I went from Redhad to Suselinux because of YAST ; linux set me free hhh ; that was great amazing old days . thanks for your work .
Jesus christ. This reminds me of why I DON'T miss dealing with a slackware based linux distro set up. What a damn nightmare. waaaaay too much crap to config JUST to have a basic functional system. Thanks for the video regardless good man. Cheers to ya.
I remember running Linux exactly as you describe, many years ago on my an AMD 386DX-40. I had the CD-ROM sets and got Slackware installed and even managed to recompile the kernel a few times, which seemed to take forever. I even used an old TRS-80 computer as serial terminal from another room, just to see if I could do it. But I never tried to get X11/X-Windows running on that machine. Then I forgot about Linux for a while ...
This brings back memories. I don't know if I ever installed Slackware, but I installed a really early distro called MMC and later one called SLS. The latter came on about 50 floppies. I remember going to work where I had internet access and running between three machines formatting, ftp'ing, and copying to floppy. Took a whole afternoon! I'd just bought a 486-66 DX/2 with a whopping 16MB of RAM. This was my first "PC compatible". I used System V Unix at work and at home had my own AT&T Unix PC (3b1) which ran Unix. So there was no way I was going to use DOS and Windows. I considered those to be toys and didn't bother buying a "PC" until there was something like Unix to run on it.
Oh where to begin! I love the sounds of old computers and servers. If you dealt with UNIX servers and workstations, the computer noises(music)is much louder and in some cases, some Unix workstations have actual MUSIC tones during start up!(SGI). I would have NEVER tried installing Linux or UNIX on a 386 but wow, I love the fact you did and inspired me to try as well. I love the old GUI desktops of Linux and Unix. In 1993 I was deep into electronic door access controls, and electrical wiring so computers did not come into my life until AFTER tech school in 1997 when I saw Windows and internet! Oh what a world changer that was! Imagine, I could write a letter to a company in Belgium via Juno mail, and get a response in minutes or days instead of months! Now THAT was a game changing miracle for me.. And all that, with Windows 3.11 for work groups and msdos. Linux would have totally blown my mind if I was able to learn it back then in my 20s.. In my 40s, I am using Linux and enjoying it but as we age, and life bears down on us, it is not the same fresh feeling. It is more nostalgia for a simpler less stressful time when we had more time to kill, playing with software and discovering a new technology/toy.. I love your vids, as they bring that nostalgia. If you love computer sounds.. wait till you get a load of a ATT system V graphic Unix workstation or DEC VAX system with Open VMS unix starting up!
My favorite retro Linux distro is Crux 2.2 from 2006 with 2.6.15 kernel which can be happily installed on a very broad range of machines from mid 90's pentium's to intel core's from mid 00's. It has all the things you would expect from a Linux O/S and even there is no problem with getting more modern software like git to work -- in short an ideal dev platform to hack on, irc, or read email/usenet. Still it is very light and lean compared to more modern releases. I have it installed on an old pentium 133 with DOS 6.22 on second partition.
I remember doing something like this! Mid-90s so it wasn't my daily driver, just a spare PC, with the intent that it had the fast 33.6 modem in it, and I set up IP masquerading on it to share the dial-up internet connection to all the networked computers in the house, that way my tech-enthusiast roommate and I wouldn't have to fight over the phone line. Which was there only for internet access of course. I used the A and N floppy disk sets to get the basic system and networking up and running, then used the dialup connection to download everything else I needed. Which wasn't much I don't think, I never installed X.
![Blox Fruits Dragon Rework Update [Full Stream]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EqDAp8udhm0/mqdefault.jpg)
Wow this brings back memories. Spending all night downloading the distro to a stack of floppies over a slow dial-up connection, trying to figure out all the options (and almost always choosing the default), making a custom kernel, waiting hours to compile it--I loved Slackware.
Those speakers bring back memories. I remember the same design being sold under a few different names, but their worst "feature" was they would occasionally somehow pick up frequencies from passing cargo trucks. You'd be laying in bed at 2 AM and out of nowhere, full volume, it sounds like a truck driver is in your room shouting about rest stops.
I'm not that far in. at that time, I was 12 or so. but my PC was a 386DX 40Mhz with 4 MB ram and 2x 40MB MFM harddrives, one 1,44MB 3.5" drive and one 5.25" 360KB drive.
even just the idea that 1.44 MB got you somewhere now is somewhat mindblowing.
the smallest compact flash I still have is 8MB. even that is ludicrously small, when my current digital camera is very comfortable with a 32GB SD and my laptop has 64GB ram.
and regarding linux, a while ago, the most extreme part I learned was: besides real breaks where hardware is no longer supported, even really old linux installations can run with really modern kernels. I read about somebody who ran a "modern" kernel (5 years ago) on an old pentium or so.
of course, you need to have the proper amount of ram.
I have no clue where the next 10 or 20 years will go. but currently, everyone is a bit too cloud-crazy in my opinion. cloud OS also means to give up on running programs independently.
Me and 3 friends got access to a computer lab at my university, we broke up and downloaded an image on something like 20 machines. We finally found a use for those AOL disks! We then spent DAYS getting the system to work. Slackware was amazing for the time, but I'd never return to it. I'm running Kubuntu now. Yeah, I know it's a copy of CDE, but it does't suck now, although it took a good 20 years. What a nightmare of difficulty.
This is the kind of linux content i want
Enjoy....
hahahha rotfl.
Yeah, takes me back. I didn't try Linux until five or six years later, and I remember that X still took a lot of configuring.
Slackware doesn't look a lot different now, which is nice.
@Lassi Kinnunen Sounds like an AVM Fritz! Card. I don't think there were even other manufacturers at the time, at least not in germany😁
Yeah a guy who says DIS instead of THIS, huh? That's what you want?
Get off my internet. This is an AMERICAN website - not a FOREIGN website, FOREIGN.
No FOREIGN. That's a BAD FOREIGN.
Seeing that old PC case made me regret not taking as many of the surplus school computers as I could back in 1999
They were giving them away!
This was exactly my computing life in the early 90’s. I had a home built 386 dx 40 running Slackware. This was before kernel modules so I was constantly reconfiguring and recompiling kernel. Kernel compiles took all night!
(grins) do you remember running monolithic uncompressed kernels named vmlinuz?
Do you still use Linux? I use Arch.
@@zootallures7003 vmlinuZ were compresed images. UNcompressed images were vmlinuX
I was thinking the same. I had a 486dx30 with 4mb memory and 120mb HD, but my set of addon boards were exactly the same, down to the crappy proprietary single-speed cdrom drive. I was curious about everything back then, and slackware was one of the "shareware" cdroms you could borrow for free, very exciting stuff.
I think I'd rather commit suicide than recompile a kernel again. Thank goodness for modules, and Linus opposed them. Modules are SLIGHTLY slower. I initially opposed them, but I'd never recompile my kernel again to integrate. Getting X to work, oh, what a nightmare that was.
Amazing how little the Slackware setup program has changed.
Was thinking exactly the same
Microsoft used to be pretty conservative as well before Vista.
@@zwz.zdenek win7 install is pretty dang basic, too.
@@retroianer422 I like everything retro... don't care if its ms-dos / os2 / windows / linux / unix ... Not taking sides :)
With OSS and volunteer development, most of the times "good enough" is all you'll ever get. And an aesthetic redesign of an installer is a LOW priority.
Oh, the memories. A 386SX16 was my first PC, coming from the Commodore64 and Apple II Plus. All the hardware you've got there was the de-facto standard for DOS gaming back then. Thanks for sharing!
Slackware 1.1.2 was my first exposure to Linux, my buddy and I had picked up a copy while in HK. We were both HP-UX sysads and thought it would be fun to play with. Getting the GUI to work was always a challenge in those days, but really turned us all into hardcore geeks :) Been using some type of Linux ever since. Thanks for taking me back, many very fond memories from those days.
Wow this was a trip down memory lane! Retro computing is alive and well great job!
Glad you enjoyed it !
That brings back many memories. I still can remember that I downloaded those floppy images using our dial-in connection (I was working as electronic engineer with 17 man personnel at a recycle company that repaired discarded consumer electronics and resold that stuff as second hand). It was my first experience with Linux.
Funny side note: By using Linux I got used to more non-Windows environments (well - I used RiscOS on the Acorn Archimedes before using Windows, but that's a whole other story), that was helpful when I learned Novell Netware. I have worked as installer and administrator for Novell Netware (from version 3.11 to 5.1) for a while, before jumping to a UNIX/Windows environment. Good old times!
After getting tired of grabbing stuff together and long downloads I switched to in-box distributions. Red hat was a bit too expensive, so I opted for S.u.S.E 4.2 (now openSUSE) and the later versions after that. When I got a demo of Mandrake Linux, I got blown away by the (by that time) great installer and desktop and started using that distribution until it "faded out". Nowadays I am using Linux Mint (LTS version) with the Cinnamon desktop.
I’ve used linux briefly on the desktop using the RedHat 5/6 timeframe. I then switched to windows and macOS cause that was used in the workplace and I could not be bothered with OS incompatibilities in a team. I only use Linux now in backend / cloud environments, just the basic shell stuff. But with the move to more server-less architectures and cloud native solution, I am excited to see what will come next..
Actually suse and open suse are different, suse is still around too
xeyes is a must for every x11 or xwindow users
Yes it is ... iconic :)
I hated xeyes so much. Learning how to remove it was an introduction to customizing fvwm2 or twm.
@@mstandish Heresy.
@@BlownMacTruck those damn eyes following my mouse. Judging my computing skills. I know they tell syslog what I'm doing.
@@mstandish All you had to do was put a piece of tape over them.
0:19 Holy crap! An old Mitsumi single-speed CD-ROM drive! That was the first CD-ROM drive I ever purchased, in 1993, as a sixth-grader for my 486! Man, I thought I was the king of the world with that thing. I've never seen anyone else have one just like it.
I am actually amazed the most by that weird top loader CD-ROM drive.
Seeing vintage computers, Windows 3.x and early Linux versions is fun but this thing really was my personal highlight.
Even more so than you guiding us through the setup of X
Ooh this brings back memories. So much time spent at the local college, downloading and writing slackware disks for the various software groups, only to come back home and find one didn't work for some reason and waiting for the next visit to the computer lab to try again.
I can imagine ... also had my share of floppy issues during the making of this video :)
Yeah, memories. Last floppy distro I used was 42 floppies - took some iterations between school and home until all worked.
CheapBytes certainly provided a welcome service...
I had installed slackware in April 1994 on a 386 dx 40 Mhz.. This was my very first Linux installation .. Beautiful memories..
Ahh this brings back memories! In high school I had an IBM PC, upgraded with a no-name 386sx40 motherboard in it, with 4 megs of RAM and a 40 meg hard drive. I too ran Slackware on the machine, installed from floppies. Coming from a System 7 Mac, it was refreshing to have protected memory! I'd been learning C on the Mac, and bad pointers would often just crash the whole machine. Not so with Linux! :D
Nice one .... seems to hit a nostalgic note with a lot of people ... so mission accomplished :)
@@RetroSpector78 Definitely rose colored lenses, though! Dependency tracking is a good thing! (And something that Slackware never did afaik, lol.)
@@Lee_Adamson_OCF You would not have had a lot of free space with a 40 mb hd lol. It would have been crammed to the gills.
Still use slackware
@@wishusknight3009 Yeah, but it was too slow to run X11, so I ended up reinstalling without it, which helped.
This is wonderful to see again. Pretty much exactly how I got started, with Slackware 1.1 on floppies. Spent all of christmas 1993 exploring the whole new world that was Linux. :)
Luckily I had a beefier machine than yours (486-50 with 16MB RAM, Tseng ET4000) so it ran really well.
Later on I discovered Walnut Creek and wow, they were so awesome. Still got my first CD sets of Slackware 2.0 and a FreeBSD from the same time, somewhere..
That was truly an exciting time to be a computer nerd. Finally, we could have the massive power of Unix, at home, on cheap hardware! Completely unheard of. I feel privileged to have experienced this journey from the early days.
Thank you for the flashback, this was a really good watch. Please, more retro Linux. :)
Still lots more linux distributions to look at :) And might also try it on my beefier 486 ... But do want to find some 4MB sticks for this one so I can bump the memory.
Great vid and brings back memories. I ran Slackware 2.something, NT 4.0, and Win 95 all on my 850 MB Pentium 100 in 1997. A total hit with the ladies.
I love these videos! It gives us a real perspective on what it was like to actually install Linux on a computer in the 90’s
I'm gutted I got rid of my boards. I had over 350 boards, graphics cards, memory, sound cards, motherboards, floppy drives, hard drives collected since I was a student in college.. Sold the lot for £90 + £20 postage. But I kept my 386 with everything working. I even have a 486 dx 2 upgrade inside it. Fantastic machine and I love typing on the traditional click keys. Thanks for your video it made my day
Should have sold it to me :) Yeah these things take up a lot of room ... have ton of stuff here and it's always a fine line to walk on with the misses ..... the rule of thumb is that I can do whatever I want as long as it stays out of the living room, kitchen, hallway, bathroom, bedroom, guest room, laundry room, toilets, .......
So amazing, I'm very grateful for show to everybody this old-school system installation, I'm 25 years old and I'm so excited for complaining how the tech has grew up across the time! You rock!
Thx a lot ... appreciate it !
I have a DecPC DX486 from 1994, I am running Slackware 3.0, linux 1.2.13, not the oldest diestro I have ran, but works well. System is used daily as an X widows front to my pi cluster
lol! "darkstar" - yeah, that brings back the memories. Slackware was my gateway to EMACS, and all the joy it brings. If I remember, there was EMACS for the terminal, and EMACS for xwindow; you had to make a floppy set for each to do the install to get both.
That CD-rom drive is epic! Remember our first CD-Rom drive which was a 5 speed philips IDE drive from around 1995/1996 in our 486 at the time. Those where the days of multimedia awesomeness! Just like “Van Kooten en Bie’s Adventures of the White Cleck” sketch. You must be pretty patient with that early linux install, some Dos games still make me want to pull out my hair if something doesn’t work.
oh shit, the flashbacks, I remember I attempted this back in the day on a 486 but with Slackware 3 or 4, of course not all the floppies worked so I had to mount a cdrom on another computer over nfs using a hand made PLIP cable my dad helped me to solder, all this in order to install my first Linux system, it took me about 2 weeks but I learned more about computers and networks in those 2 weeks than I have ever in my life, I keep Slackware deep in my heart and used it until version 7, thank you for this video, it made me remember the good old days!!
6:08 “Lesstif” - that was an open-source (GNU?) implementation of the OSF Motif GUI, aka “CDE” (“Common Desktop Environment”). I think that was the one that introduced the concept of multiple virtual desktops.
Motif is a look-and-feel specification and the Motif libraries implemented this specification. Lesstif is a free, clean room, implementation of this specification that aimed to have an API that implemented the same API that the Motif libraries implemented. CDE was a desktop environment that used Motif. The relationship is the same way that KDE uses Qt.
I think I just fell in love with that CD-ROM drive 😍
Yeah it is a nice one. Iconic brand. Got a more in-depth video of this particular 386 on the channel.
RetroSpector78 cool, I’ll check that video out! Love your channel, btw!
I know right...
AH! Linux! Here we go! 4 years after, back in 1997, I installed my first Linux distribution, Slackware 3.2.... And then Debian, and Mandrake Linux, and RedHat Linux.... Nowadays, I use Ubuntu Linux... Pretty happy with this penguim!
I went directly from windows 7 to Lubuntu on my old laptop (core 2 duo 4GB Ram GMA 4500m) and it's performing faster than it did in windows 7.
@@madmax2069 good choise! lubuntu is really fast and light.
@@gilbert1975nf Yeah, i'm quite happy with it although this is really my first outing with Linux.
I follow you sir.... I started with Linux in 1995. Went to and from Linux or Dos or various Windows versions. Ended up switching to Linux full time in 2016. Basically learning Linux from 95 to 16. Made it extremely easy to switch fully. 😁😁
I use Fedora on my work/gaming/general computing machines (with the Cinnamon desktop) and Pop!_OS on my HTPC at present.
I have to say I love how that CD drive opens, it's awesome
Yes, like it too ))
I remember first hearing about Linux in high school. My first experience was installing Red Hat 6 on a Pentium 133. I think I got everything working but networking support... but I recall that setup being a lot more guided than what you went through to get this up and running!
Angela Walker - by that time, installation was indeed a lot easier-especially with Red Hat. Slackware required some hardware knowledge properly configure.
Yea, that's cuz you went with Red Hat. Great documentation, great support! As the nerd I was, I bought this with birthday money for my 14th birthday :)
Red hat 5.2 was the first "hands off" 😜, distro I remember Installing and work right out the box with X and all. It was great. After a while I got on Slackware for a while just for the learning process. Nice memories 😃
Lmao that profile picture
Slackware was sort of the Arch of the day. It was pretty easy to install, but it did dump you onto a shell and configuring anything was up to you. But it was clean and out of the way. The downside was there was no way of automatically updating anything. Packages were just tars that you extracted onto the filesystem.
I installed Slackware on floppies like that MANY, many, times. Thanks for the flashbacks.
I grew up around when these type of computers were just leaving circulation [was born in 99'] we still had one but don't think it was used much. I always think "Man the 90's weren't that far off, it's only been like 12 years since then!" Then I realize it's somehow 2020 and almost 24+ years have passed lmao Time really flies by.
I feel your confusion
beginning of the 90s for me right in the P-II to P-III high time and finale of the 486 era
In 1995 I did my first Linux install, exactly like this! 11 disks. And I installed it on my brand new 486. What a joy! I had used Minix but this with XFree86 was a step up.
Linux was a lot of fun ... can't tell you how any hours I've spent compiling apps and getting them to work ....
@@RetroSpector78 I know right! I had an DEC Alpha in 1997/1998 and started to recompile and port apps to 64bit. It was educational and extremely frustrating.
I didn't use minix until well after I was comfortable with linux.....minix was cool though....1,44 meg root partition, and you installed everything from tgz files....it was dead simple, dead effective....and lots of fun....still remember building NCSA(early httpd) on my DEC minix server....and setting up a perl powered chat site...
I had a computer just like that back in the early 90s! When I built it I was running OS/2 Warp.
About a week after the install I read an article about Linux with an add for the Yggdrassil
Linux Distribution (on CDROM). I have been running Linux as my primary OS ever since.
Except now it's Linux on a Hades Canyon NUC, OS on NVMe, home and backups on a QNAP.
That PC is so similar to my first one, back in 94, same RAM, Video and 40MHz 486SX, Slackware was the first Linux distro I installed, so it took me like a month to download that via dial-up in pieces. A lot of memories, nice video.
Glad you liked it !
This sure takes me back...
Slackware was my daily driver for a few years, starting after christmas 1996.
On my Pentium 1 MMX beast.
hoping to get an upgrade to 16MB on this thing .... X is no fun with only 4MB of RAM
@@RetroSpector78 Oh, man. I had 32MB of RAM on my AMD 386DX-40 back in the day, with I think 256K of cache as well. It was a great machine, with SCSI hard drives and CD-ROMs, and a 2MB ISA video card.
Fantastic! This video takes me all the way back to my first experience with Slackware. In those days I was also installing Netware 3.12 at the office from about 21 diskettes. What a thrill that was. ;-)
5:59 “ELF Release” -- was this, then, about the time Linux distros switched from a.out-format executables to using ELF?
Linux used a.out until kernel 1.2. In Slackware 3.0 ELF compilation was the default setting and somewhere starting 1.2.x they switched to ELF. Older versions of the kernel could not be compiled using ELF so you needed to change Makefiles
a.out support was fully deprecated and removed from the mainline kernel in 5.1 just last year...
It's the end of an era.
R.I.P. (1971 - 2019)
The ELF switch was actually part of a major Unix-wide change starting with SVR4. It replaced both a.out and COFF, but the last wasn't noticeable on Linux, so I didn't learn about it until Wikipedia.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_and_Linkable_Format
In 1993 i was rocking my beautiful Amiga 1200 with 80mb ide hard drive... 😍
same here .... only it was an amiga 500 without hard drive :) difficult to compare obviously, but I only got my first PC in 1997. Before that it was Amiga, Commodore 64, Philips MSX .... Never had a 1200, but remember looking at those magazines from the UK and lusting over these amiga 600 / 1200 / 4000s .... were so far out of reach. Picked up an amiga1200 last year and only turned it on once so far ... a shame ... need to create a video on it I think :)
@@RetroSpector78 C64 was my first computer... but A500 was my first love back in 1988. I grew up with it. I own a kickstart 1.2 chicken lips with hi-tek keyboard, and last week i installed a 1Gb SCSI hard drive that worked flawlessly on it. That's insane! Wonderful machine. You definitely have to make a video (or a series) on it!
@@BlackGymkhana Got tons of commodore and amiga stuff here ... just gotta find the time ... you can't win them all :)
I got my A1200 + 80mb HDD in 1993 :) Before that I had A500 and Oric Atmos (Close to being Commodore 64). Later I had 68060 and 16mb on that A1200. Amiga's demoscene was amazing. Calling to BBS with your modem to get the newest demos and intros was great fun. I also used WWW on Amiga 1200, but I cannot remember which year and with which accelerator card.
I also remember one of my friends big brother using Linux in 1993-95. I remember because it was a big deal here in Finland, as Linus Torvalds was Finnish. I was too young at the time, so I only got into Linux in 2002, and completely abandoned Windows in 2016. Now being novice Gentoo user =)
Looking at the system reminds me of browsing through computer shopper back when it was a 600 page catalog that weighed 4 pounds.
Slackware was my first linux distro at the ending of 1999 i liked it very much and learned to compile the kernel .
The hours spent (or wasted) on building kernels :) probably takes 3 hours on this one, and 5 seconds in my VM :)
@@RetroSpector78 it was needed i had a tv tuner i remember that i wanted to work also i could remove stuff i didn't wanted back then it was needed unfortunately
19:51 Seems to be there was no /usr/share in those days; architecture-independent data is going into /usr/lib instead.
That Mitsumi was my first CD-ROM drive. Set me back a cool $250
Thank you for doing this the RIGHT WAY sir with appropriate hardware for the time instead of just using a virtualbox.
26:52 it's a good thing you're starting now because by the time the next video comes out it'll be done!
Haha :)
I used to love those speakers, I had a pair for many years before they went pop one day.
If you raised the volume too much, something happened and they would break not long after. And you would want more volume. Always.
Man, I love that kind of pc case, that on off switch it's amazing; in the early nineties those were popular where I lived but I couldn't afford it, and now it is almost impossible to find one. Great video.
Back when you could actually read the output at boot. Now I can't even focus a line before I'm in X.
True, I can relate even though I saw this happening with Ubuntu, the text is really interesting to read but it goes too fast before I can read it...
Thank you so much! Brought back lots of memories! At 22 yo in 93/94 I downloaded 25 Slackware floppies, via dial-up, from a local Mustang bulletin board in Fort Lauderdale. The Internet did not yet exist and I remember Windows 95 being announced in the news as the Chicago Project; DOS was king back then. I realize now that I am fortunate to be one of the first geeks to install one of the first publicly available Linux. I set it up on a malfunctioning Compaq Deskpro 386SX25. I remember using the Mosaic browser on dial-up. Later I used the Linux machine as a shared print server and it worked great for the entire office. Novell Netware was then the preferred networking software using IPX (no TCP/IP) and 10BaseT network cards. Those were the days. Thank you for the flash back!
Wish I had RUclips back then.I remember trying to to do this and not having a clue where to begin or knowing anyone that could help.
indeed unbelievable how we managed to get things done back in the day.
You had USENET, and there would have been lots of people willing to help there.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 I was in the middle of Nowhere Oklahoma with a computer that couldn't get on ANYNET.lol
@@fulkthered Didn’t need to. If you could make and receive phone calls, you could connect to USENET. It was actually a separate thing from the Internet.
@@fulkthered Hey, I remember my first experience with Usenet on 1993/09/278, and I lived in a pretty middle of nowhere area. Edit: That is NOT a typo. I really did mean 278 Sep 93.
oh my god that soundblaster pro was my precious when i finally got one, omg that mitsumi singlespeed, that came with its own controller card.
good times.
yeah ... would have given an arm and a leg for the hardware inside that computer back in the day.
I've still got a Sound BLASTER Pro 2. Currently, it resides in my Tandy 1000 RSX.
This video was a lot of fun to watch! Thanks for making it. ✨
You are very welcome ... still lots more linux distributions and old operating systems in the pipeline.
I used Slackware until recently (well over 20 years). A lot has changed with Slackware but it still installs the same. What I really like about Slack is that it expects you to know better and not assume that you don't. :D I recognize all the hardware, especially that gorgeous Model M keyboard (I own three of them). I'd recognize that sound anywhere! Thanks for a great video (from a guy who can still listen to a modem negotiate on a phone line and tell you which speed it's working at)!
hehe .... it is not a model M though ... it's a Chicony KB-5181 (Huyndai branded as it came with a Huyndai 286 PC)
@@RetroSpector78 I remember those keyboards now that you mentioned that name. They're just as good as the Model Ms if I remember right.
That case looks very familiar. I built a 386 system from a box of random parts which were gifted to me, and used that box as a firewall for my first home network. That network used BNC connected coax to share a single 56k modem between 2 computers.
I had a fascination with running modern linux on older hardware and read a nice post about a guy who'd gotten modern linux on a 486, but running period linux on period hardware is just the kind of content I didn't know I wanted until I saw this video, nice.
You need to put these things in context. I’m not one of those retro purists that think you can or should still do something useful with a 386 or 486. I like the nostalgia and making videos on them, but I don’t do anything business critical on it :) I do enjoy playing some games on old hardware and fiddling around with old software but that’s it :)
@@RetroSpector78 Oh of course not, I sure hope that the guy who got gentoo running on that 486 wasn't going to try and use it for work! :P
I did see at some point during the video a disc with Doom for Linux advertised, I'd never seen that port on real hardware before, think you could do a video of that running on the 386?
ripper253 doom on a 386 is a no-go, even not in msdos. Tried it in virtualbox on slackware 1.1.2 and that ran fine :) think I will try doom on a 486 or pentium. For the 386 it will be console only apps. Unless I get a 16mb upgrade donation :)
RetroSpector78 oh yeah, the 386 slideshow for DOOM might’ve been tolerable, but you’re absolutely right, running X was already a nightmare on 4mb, I couldn’t imagine shoving doom on top of that as well! Seeing doom on a 486 would be pretty sweet though, don’t suppose you’ve got sim city classic for X as well?
I used this very distro on a AMD 386 DX-40 with 8 MB Ram. Ran it for years!
Really need a memory upgrade for this one ...
@@RetroSpector78 Yeah, 4M is not the way to go with a 90's Linux. You really need the DX data path and 8M. The machine becomes very usable. I'd compare a 386 DX 40 to a Sun IPX.
My GF now wife loaned me 70$ to buy this pc when i was bored and penniless student. Learn web programming and made tons of money. Good old days. Thank you for making this video!
I loved your video, in the past i have thats similar case with same motherboard, running MSDOS and starting my Slackware using loadlin.
Thanks for remember.
Glad you (and so many others) liked it !
Having installed modern slackware a few weeks ago its surprising how much of the setup process is still the exact same.
This brings back memories of running Slackware 2.2 with the 1.2.1 kernel on my P5-90 system in 1995. I had to wait a couple of months for Trident 9440 support to be added to XFree86. I attached my old Tandy 1000 to the serial port with a null modem cable and used it as a second text console.
love these old linux distros thanks for the video
Glad you liked it !
I started using both Slackware and Debian back in the '90's.. Both awesome distros! Nice to see your retro computer RUclips page running GNU/Linux.. Most retro computer pages here just show MSDOS or Microsoft Windows.. I don't mind that but Linux was also around back then. The early days :) Fun to ticker and try the new Operating Systems :)
Many happy memories of installing Slackware 2.0 from floppy back in the day. I remember not having enough floppies. I had to go to university, download the bare minimum disk sets, install then repeat. Especially frustrating as I had to rebuild the kernel to get my HDD working at a reasonable speed. Thought it very odd that you had to rebuild so much from source just to "install a disk driver" and that Windows/DOS was so much easier... After a brief interlude in Windows/Netware land I've spent 20 years building embedded Linux systems so I hope I learned the error of my ways! ;-)
This video brings so much memory back :-) remember installing Slackware 3.0 on my old 486sx25 back in the mid 90s, looks almost identical. Remember also calculating the modelines per resolution in the xorg config file
Sadly, I recognize virtually every piece of the hardware.
Muahahahaha...me ..too!!!! old junkie
This is the stuff I played with as a kid in the 90's. I got all the old computers to play with once my parents or their friends were done with them.
Same here. The dark ages. Sadly, I still have a lot of that old hardware in a closet!
@@fiveable Sadly?
Wow. Loving this video. I had a lot of Walnut Creek CDs I would get from my local book and music store. Had Slackware 1.2. Although I didn't get serious into Linux until Mandrake in 2000 because I wanted to run ShowEQ which was a packet sniffer and analyzer for the EverQuest MMO. Before Linux (and not counting DOS and Windows) it was OS/2 for a multi-line BBS.
I feel like this kind of video is about as nerdy as it gets. Good stuff!
Ha! Xeyes! My go-to app for testing my X windows install back in the day.
I see we have even been spoiled by recent Linux distros. Installing Slackware reminded me of installing ancient versions of SunOS that required all kinds of manual steps related to partitions, disk mirrors, etc.
exactly, however once you get past the partitioning stuff things are pretty smooth sailing in order to finish the install and get up and running. The lack of a package manager and dependency management was a real pain for me .... compiling compiling / swapping libraries in / out .... you were always busy not being productive :) But it sure was fun.
Great video! Really interesting to take a look at such an early version of Linux. Would love to see a video with the early BSD releases one day!
On the TODO list ... still a lot of distro's to go through ... but other stuff on TODO list also.
@@RetroSpector78 Do Minix
I had the same case back in the days it felt good to see my old friend again
Glad you enjoyed it !
So hard to find content like this, back in the day what would this have done better than dos, maybe windows 3 which is what most 386 machines would have had.
I pulled down the floppy install sets for Slackware over a 19.2kbit/s serial connection while at university back in '95. Took ages, but I managed to get it installed. Used SLiRP over that same serial interface to get TCP/IP up and running. Those were the days!
oh shit .. Trident .... i didnt heared this name for soooooooooo long. Thats amazing! Thank you for reminding me past. Feels great! :-)
hehe .... nice to see it hit a nostalgic nerve :)
If only I had had the room to keep all my old systems! Then I could go to the Senior Center and demonstrate the good ol' days. Thanks for memories.
Nice video! My first Linux installation was Redhat 5.2, but it looked very much like this.
Have a Redhat 5.2 video on the channel also :) found this installation to be a bit more raw using the disk sets. Redhat 5.2 was a lot more elaborate and cd based and pretty straightforward. Amazing how much of a difference a couple of years brings.
you said it, this kind of videos are beautiful
ps. that CD rom drive is BEAUTIFUL
Very nice! Back then I started with SLS distribution, later switched to Slackware and S.u.S.E. The last time I have installed such an ancient Linux was some years ago with SLS on a virtual machine and Debian 2.1 "Slink" on a real 486 machine. That was fun and whilst the SLS needed a lot of manual configuration, Debian "Slink" from 1999 was a big step ahead!
I was amazed at how easy this one went ... fact that it has premium hardware did help a lot. As soon as you needed different drivers and needed to do a lot of compiling things quickly became complicated for most people
Oh man... I have computers from 1968 up until the modern age... But I truly love these 386 age machines. It made so many things possible back then. So I might dig one out and go trough this experience once again.
Slackware was my first Linux. Installed from floppies. I don't remember what the problem was, but It took me days to install and reinstall and configure.
Back then my hard drive was a whooping 20 MB. Yes that's 20 Mega Bytes.
Thx for the memories.
Probably bad floppies ? :) I had a kernel panic but on the second run it went fine. 20mb is really small yeah ... my smallest hd in a 386 was 40mb I think :)
It totally looks like xeyes is judging you for the windows intro :D
Slackware was my first Linux distro. I installed it from disks around summer 1995, so it would have probably been v2.3.
Literally all my hardware worked out of the box. It was a 486DX4 with 12MB of RAM, and a Adaptec 1542 SCSI controller with SCSI HDD and NEC SCSI CD-ROM. A Sound Blaster 16, 3Com 3c509 network card, US Robotics courier 56K modem, and a ATI Graphics Ultra (Mach8) video card with NEC MultiSync 5FG monitor. The Mach8 is special as by default it emulates the IBM 8514/A video card, which made installation a breeze, and my NEC monitor was also on the list, so I immediately had 1024x768@75Hz without having to really do much.
I had built the system myself and picked each part over the years for maximum compatibility and performance. So while my friends were struggling to install OS/2 or Linux, my system would work with anything.
That's some premium hardware right there .... and that's what you needed back in the day ... spent so many nights compiling kernels and modules to get hardware to work ... it was always a pain ... unless you have creative / adaptec / 3com / ......
@@RetroSpector78 I got to do plenty of that the following years, as I got RHEL certified and would get new servers up and running for customers with brand-new network and storage drivers that had not yet been up-streamed. And patching the RH Anaconda installer to support the new drivers properly for network boot and install. Those were the days :-)
This is the same CPU and distribution that I started with. I had an old IBM XGA monitor and it made all kinds of noises when I put in the wrong modlines for xfree86.
That was better than an episode of first-season MASH. Thank you.
Slacker since '96th and still using it.
My father had a same 386 at work, and this was a dream as I had at home 286 a the time. That mitsumi x1 speed CD is a bit futuristic, but man this is awesome!
Back when the PC featured here was new I hadn't even heard of Linux yet, which I don't believe I discovered until 1995. Even then I didn't install my first distribution until 2007. I was a solid Windows guy until then, but these days I do run Linux Mint as my main OS. I love retro hardware, but I'm not sure how useful it would be today running Linux. About the only thing that interests me to do with such old PCs is retro gaming, and for that era you'd be using DOS. Still it was very interesting seeing the setup. Sometimes half the fun is configuring things.
Exactly ... there is zero practical use for this type of stuff, but it does help to put things in perspective and see where we came from and where we are today. It's also nice to re-produce these things on actual hardware. In a VM it is very difficult to recreate that feeling. By default it takes 5 seconds to compile a kernel in my VM. On this machine it took 20 minutes to do a compile dep :) And you also don't have the sounds of the harddrive, diskdrives, keyboard .....
@@RetroSpector78 I agree. Using actual period hardware is so much more satisfying than a virtual machine.
@@thereallantesh Except for when you need to build a kernel :)
Watching this is a nice way to celebrate Slackware 15!
I should do a comparison video :)
Commentary here are as fun as the video itself 👍👍👍
Long live Slackware!!!
I remember doing this!!!! Thank you so much for the flashback!
I remember installing slackware from floppies, I don't remember what version it was but I think I needed about 20 or 30 floppies. It really sucked when floppy 3 of 4 in a set had an error on it lol. Slackware was my go to distro for a long time when I was still distrohopping.
Slackware was my first linux distro . I had 486dx 16 mb of ram , then my teacher gave The Redhat CD as computer grows on power I went from Redhad to Suselinux because of YAST ; linux set me free hhh ; that was great amazing old days . thanks for your work .
Jesus christ. This reminds me of why I DON'T miss dealing with a slackware based linux distro set up. What a damn nightmare. waaaaay too much crap to config JUST to have a basic functional system.
Thanks for the video regardless good man. Cheers to ya.
Thanks ... doing the setup turned out to be very easy here. Premium hardware helped ...
I remember running Linux exactly as you describe, many years ago on my an AMD 386DX-40. I had the CD-ROM sets and got Slackware installed and even managed to recompile the kernel a few times, which seemed to take forever. I even used an old TRS-80 computer as serial terminal from another room, just to see if I could do it. But I never tried to get X11/X-Windows running on that machine. Then I forgot about Linux for a while ...
11:16 This was before it became possible to notify the running kernel about partition table changes.
This brings back memories. I don't know if I ever installed Slackware, but I installed a really early distro called MMC and later one called SLS. The latter came on about 50 floppies. I remember going to work where I had internet access and running between three machines formatting, ftp'ing, and copying to floppy. Took a whole afternoon! I'd just bought a 486-66 DX/2 with a whopping 16MB of RAM. This was my first "PC compatible". I used System V Unix at work and at home had my own AT&T Unix PC (3b1) which ran Unix. So there was no way I was going to use DOS and Windows. I considered those to be toys and didn't bother buying a "PC" until there was something like Unix to run on it.
Oh where to begin! I love the sounds of old computers and servers. If you dealt with UNIX servers and workstations, the computer noises(music)is much louder and in some cases, some Unix workstations have actual MUSIC tones during start up!(SGI). I would have NEVER tried installing Linux or UNIX on a 386 but wow, I love the fact you did and inspired me to try as well. I love the old GUI desktops of Linux and Unix. In 1993 I was deep into electronic door access controls, and electrical wiring so computers did not come into my life until AFTER tech school in 1997 when I saw Windows and internet! Oh what a world changer that was! Imagine, I could write a letter to a company in Belgium via Juno mail, and get a response in minutes or days instead of months! Now THAT was a game changing miracle for me.. And all that, with Windows 3.11 for work groups and msdos. Linux would have totally blown my mind if I was able to learn it back then in my 20s.. In my 40s, I am using Linux and enjoying it but as we age, and life bears down on us, it is not the same fresh feeling. It is more nostalgia for a simpler less stressful time when we had more time to kill, playing with software and discovering a new technology/toy.. I love your vids, as they bring that nostalgia. If you love computer sounds.. wait till you get a load of a ATT system V graphic Unix workstation or DEC VAX system with Open VMS unix starting up!
I had the same 386 in 1994 with the same cd-rom reader :)
Classic hardware !
Wow, this brought back some memories! Linux has come so far since then.
My favorite retro Linux distro is Crux 2.2 from 2006 with 2.6.15 kernel which can be happily installed on a very broad range of machines from mid 90's pentium's to intel core's from mid 00's. It has all the things you would expect from a Linux O/S and even there is no problem with getting more modern software like git to work -- in short an ideal dev platform to hack on, irc, or read email/usenet. Still it is very light and lean compared to more modern releases.
I have it installed on an old pentium 133 with DOS 6.22 on second partition.
I remember doing something like this! Mid-90s so it wasn't my daily driver, just a spare PC, with the intent that it had the fast 33.6 modem in it, and I set up IP masquerading on it to share the dial-up internet connection to all the networked computers in the house, that way my tech-enthusiast roommate and I wouldn't have to fight over the phone line. Which was there only for internet access of course.
I used the A and N floppy disk sets to get the basic system and networking up and running, then used the dialup connection to download everything else I needed. Which wasn't much I don't think, I never installed X.
Loving that type of content. Keep the old Linux going