What was your first operating system or Linux Distribution?

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Holy CRAP, am I literally the oldest person here?
CP/M, with the 8" disks
Then DOS -> Windows -> Linux (Mandrake, then tried a few different ones, then Debian and stuck with Debian)
- I started with the last version of DOS, 6.2, on PC.
  Unless you count the Amstrad CPC464 I had before that? Ran on tapes, disks were futuristic!
  Which of us is older? I'm not sure it natters. What matters is that the kids will never understand the elegance of a command line interface or of running out of memory to store your code.
  
  Haha yeah I did some tapes. There was some crazy thing that hooked up to my TV at home that used cassette tapes.
  And yeah, BBS culture, and programming on some of the old school machines, PEEK and POKE and pre-OSX Macs, and segmented memory in the 8088-286 era. To this day I have never really understood what the point of segmented memory was, but that was what we had back in the day, and we were grateful.
  I also got to do some programming at a place that had one of the massive Onyx2 machines. It lived in a whole separate room and was the size of a refrigerator. Good stuff.
  
  Ah, the precious main memory.... Let's see if we can't get this mouse driver to load in upper memory to save me some precious main memory...
  
  Yep, and then DOS 5 coming in like space program technology, that could put the whole OS in high memory and give you 640 kb all for the user programs. And it had a DISK CACHE (which for the most part didn't work).
  Godlike I tell you
  😃
  
  some crazy thing that hooked up to my TV at home that used cassette tapes.
  Sounds like my first computer, Tandy Color Computer from Radio Shack. Had it hooked to the TV via RF, & learned to program in BASIC.
- You're probably about my age. I was just late getting into computers. First attempt at university was dumb terminals connected to some Unix host. Failed everything and dropped out. Went back a few years later and had 8086 based PCs booting DOS off diskettes.
- You've got me beat. I've only seen 8" disks in coworkers "check out this shit" collection.

152 comments