[rescue] Early LINUX distros.

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 09:51:12AM +0200, Jonathan Groll wrote:
>Hmm... I assume this email was written before the morning coffee hit
>the blood stream, as even in the late 90s we didn't 'burn' floppies.
>Or maybe some of us did, in frustration.

It's a figure of speech. Probably from burining a record which was done
with a heated lathe. When I was a child a neighbor had a home recorder 
that did burn phonograph records.


>What I remember of dominant late 90s distros is of Red Hat, Mandrake
>and SuSE rather than Slackware. And, I thought Yggdraisal was gone by
>1995.

It was still spoken of in 1995, I lost track of it. I was a slackware user.


>The gold-plated CD-R disks in 1995 were also expensive.

In 1991 they were $10 each in the US. I simply no longer remember the price 
until 1997 when I bought them here in Israel for 10 NIS, which at the time was
close to $3. 

Floppies here never got below 50 NIS for 25 and that was the cheap no name
brand at Office Depot. So 14 for a Linux distro would still be expensive.


>I recall getting an early Red Hat distro from the local SunSITE
>(remember those?) and remember splitting the archive over a stack of
>about 30 (or was it 20?) floppies.

Probably. Red Hat was never small. IMHO without CD ROM drives, it would have
never taken off.

Geoff.


-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to misquote it.