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Historic Linux File Archive Created

Posted by simoniker on from the welcome-to-the-world-of-yesterday dept.

jemagid writes "Ibiblio (nee metalab, nee sunsite) has rummaged through all the old CDs and old FTP archives we could find, to put together a beautiful picture of the early days of the Linux community: Historic Linux. The files include snapshots of the early Linux archives including sunsite.unc.edu and tsx-11.mit.edu, and early distributions such as MCC (Manchester Computing Center) and SLS (Softlanding Linux Systems), which were some of the first attempts to make Linux easy to install and use. The early RedHat releases are also included, as is early Suse, Debian, Slackware, and Blade. The early distributions ran on machines as small as 386's with 2-4 MB of RAM, so these could be fun ways to resurrect ancient hardware."

5 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. Modern distros on old hardware by i.r.id10t · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Modern distros on old hardware still work - I've got a 486sx33 laptop with 4mb ram (Toshiba Satellite 1910) that had Slack 7.0 and 7.1 on it. I upped the ram to 12mb and it now is a fairly useful machine with Slack 8.1 on it.

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    Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
  2. a fun way to resurrect ancient hardware... by stratjakt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... would be to put something new on it, something the designers of the time would never have concieved. Like the hacking community around the atari 2600 or colecovision, or getting the C64 internet ready with its own ip stack. Make it do something it wasn't meant to do.

    Running a 10 year old linux on a 10 year old computer is just as interesting as running DOS or Win3.0 on it, though only half as useful. (Mod me down if you must, but linux was still very much a toy for comp sci students back then)

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    I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
  3. Re:Beautiful Picture? by kaszeta · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I remember trying to install from those same SLS diskette images downloaded from Rusty 'n Edie's at 9600 baud. It was not a pretty picture.

    Indeed, I still have a whole shoebox of floppies that (if they can still be read) consist of the current Slackware version in 1993/94. I managed to get many a free meal in exchange for letting folks borrow the box to do a Linux install. Those were the days.

    Then again, I've got better museum pieces than that, including a 486 still running Debian 0.93R5 (that even made 666 days of uptime in '96 or '97 before a power outage took it out), although it doesn't really do much other than sit there. Doing anything with it stopped being the point a long time ago...

    But really, it's rather interesting that someone is still keeping these old dists around, it's interesting to see what happened when.

  4. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  5. Re:This is great to see. by RobotWisdom · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I hope to add direct links from my Linux timeline sometime soon.