Nothing useful to contribute, but enjoy you young guys who have never known a world without PCs .
Hey! Not all of us have only used PCs, you know.
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I remember getting my first PC/DOS compatible machine. It was a Compaq portable (if you had a truck).
My dear sir, that was late in my PC evolution. My first PC was an Eagle clone (if anyone's heard of them, I'll be shocked 8O) -- I think it only had one 5.25" floppy, and no hard drive. We also set up a couple of original IBM 5150s... still had great keyboards.
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I remember sandwiching in a 5M (yes M) hard drive, full height, at the expense of one floppy.
Ha! We had to get an external one the size of a shoebox... maybe a bit larger. I think it's still sitting in the attic somewhere.
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My Hayes internal, full size card, 2400B modem...a screamer for the day..was $500.
A whopping 2400bps!? How about 300 or 1200bps? 2400bps was such a luxury... and, oh, we had only external.
Or you could get one of those business-card sized bootable Linux distros from EFF...
I've download that before. It's no help in this case as I do not have a CD drive on the laptop.
Right - but you were talking about hooking up the harddrive elsewhere, and wanted a small-footprint install. I meant that those distros might be small enough that they won't feel sluggish.
Ah yes, memories of Kindergarden. I remember I thought they were old even then. By first grade they were out.
Hmm. You must be younger than me. My 486DX2/66 that I got in high school had a 5.25" drive. And before that I used them with my C64. Between the C64 and the 486 I used my parents' computers - macs (as in, Mac, later Mac Plus), that had 3.5", but didn't have hard drives until later. I also had an Amiga 500 in high school that used 3.5". I had an expansion for it that fit a 20 meg hard drive. I still have it in a bin in the basement.
You could try installing via FTP, but I'll go ahead and assume you don't even have a modem installed on that thing either.
I don't know if this is possible, but perhaps you could partition the hard drive into 2 volumes, use a file compressor and splitter to put all the files on floppies and copy them to one of the partitions, and then run the install from the other partition... yeah, crazy idea.
Look into this distro: http://libranet.com/guide It installs on 4 floppies, but I don't know what its functionality is.
As you are aware, the are tons of distros that fit on 1 floppy. But there are some that are a litlle bit larger, although I don't know if they can install via floppy. Go here: http://www.linux.org/dist/ and search for distro in the Minimalist category.
How did people install Linux in the old days? There has to be a floppy install of linux somewhere.
Old days? Linux is only about 13 years old. Didn't most people have CD drives when it started becoming popular?
Not really. Besides, cd burners weren't available so it wasn't like you could just readily burn a copy of linux and install, like you can nowadays anyway.
That's true, I forgot that CD burners didn't come out for a while after CD drives became popular. When did burners start coming out? I think it was the mid- to late-90s, but when exactly?
Before that, I assume they just uploaded stuff to an FTP site. Most people who wanted Linux probably had a fast connection. :-)
Steve
I believe around late 90's. At least mainstream anyway.
I remember getting my first PC/DOS compatible machine. It was a Compaq portable (if you had a truck).
My dear sir, that was late in my PC evolution. My first PC was an Eagle clone (if anyone's heard of them, I'll be shocked 8O) -- I think it only had one 5.25" floppy, and no hard drive.
Consider yourself shocked. :-) I remember them. I tried to get my grandmother to get involved with their IPO. The stock had taken off on their first IPO, but the CEO died in a car accident on that same day, so they cancelled the IPO and pushed it back. I figured the stock would still take off, but suggested she sell after the IPO. Unfortunately, the stock wasn't available in Michigan, so it was a moot point. But I do remember them. :-)
Of course, my first PC makes yours look modern. I had an Apple II+ (yes, those are "PCs".) More about that in a bit....
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Originally Posted by Janak Parekh
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Originally Posted by Sven
I remember sandwiching in a 5M (yes M) hard drive, full height, at the expense of one floppy.
Ha! We had to get an external one the size of a shoebox... maybe a bit larger. I think it's still sitting in the attic somewhere.
Hard disk? :lol: My Apple II+ had a cassette interface. Getting floppy drives (5.25", 140 KB or so) months later was one of the best upgrades I made on the system.
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Originally Posted by Janak Parekh
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Originally Posted by Sven
My Hayes internal, full size card, 2400B modem...a screamer for the day..was $500.
A whopping 2400bps!? How about 300 or 1200bps? 2400bps was such a luxury... and, oh, we had only external.
Yep -- the first peripheral I bought for my Apple (purchased when I got it, in fact) was a Hayes Micromodem II (hardly "micro" -- it was a box probably bigger than a sleeve-compatible iPAQ) running at a whopping 300 baud.
Even back them, I knew how important it was to be online. I figured I could use it to connect to U of M's network and avoid going to the computing center for much of my work, and it worked. I even ran my own BBS in my dorm room for a year. :-D
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Originally Posted by Janak Parekh
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Originally Posted by Sven
It's freakin amazing.
Agreed.
Absolutely. We're "Generation Techs" -- pocket calculators, PCs, VCRs, CDs, DVDs, cable TV, satellite TV, HDTV, GPS, cell phones. With the possible exceptions of cars opening the country in the early and middle 20th century and air travel opening the world in the middle 20th century, what other generation experienced such changes?
As a kid, we had dial phones, black and white TV and adding machines.
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Re: Installing Linux
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