I really wish that I was born early so I’ve could witness the early years of Linux. What was it like being there when a kernel was released that would power multiple OSes and, best of all, for free?
I want know about everything: software, hardware, games, early community, etc.
My first experience was with two floppy images I found on “So much shareware! Vol.2”.
It was labeled Linux 0.99b, no distro. It was not of much use to me at the time.
A couple of years later I got my hands on Slackware 2.0 on CD. So much time spent compiling your own kernel, because no modules and the whole thing had to fit in main memory (640kB). So much time spent fiddling with xf86config hoping you wouldn’t fry your CRT.
Good times.
Then came gentoo, which had package management. No more did you have to browse sourceforge for endless dependencies to install something. No more did you have to re-install slackware on your root partition to update. So user-friendly in comparison.
We spent a lot of time on IRC.
MUDs kind of bridged the gap between IRC and games.
I remember spending a lot of time playing abuse, snes9x, quake + team fortress and quake2 + action quake.