To celebrate Slackware turning 30, I put on my 13.37 release t-shirt!

Off-topic, your hair looks like it’s charged by your touching the coffee cup.

Need the coffee to figure out my dependency tree after decades of manually installing things... ☕ (I kid, of course. That's what the meth is for...)

I thought you were Richard Hammond for a moment

I installed 1.0... all 23 discs that I downloaded at 2400bps because I couldn't afford a faster modem.

Does the math. 24 disks, 1.44 MB each. 34.5 MB total. That's 34,500,000 bytes. 2400 bps is actually 300 bytes per second, assuming no bits wasted on error correction or something. So 115k seconds. Or about 32 hours. Assuming no errors, blips, kids pickup up the phone, etc. Probably at least three days if you can only use your modem during off-peak hours like most of us dial up users of the era.

Do you remember it fondly? Or do you shudder in pain? ;)
- Before CD distros? Ma Bell loved us lots ... or at least our wallets.

Slackware was my first Linux distro

My first distro was a slackwear 1.x boot root floppy pair. To play around with on our brand new 60* megahertz Pentium system we got Christmas 93.

3.3 was my first love. Old enough to make me old, without being old enough to be cool.

Only thing I could find that’d easily let you install into 3meg of ram. It said you needed 4, but would let you use a second floppy drive instead of loading the first disk into ram.

Yeah I installed 1.0 from floppy disks. I was really glad to get it on CD-ROM a bit later. I probably still have those floppies around here somewhere... I wonder if they still boot? Still have my old 486 around here somewhere too, come to think of it, but I needed a custom kernel to support my SCSI card and I'm definitely not going through that pain again. (Yes I had to boot off floppy drives in order to build a kernel image to be able to install it on my hard drive.)

Probably time to get rid of it.

I expected the mug to have slack on it as well :)

But yeah, it's been quite a ride. I mean Linux in general has evolved so much over the years. My first test of Linux was from some floppy disk supplied by a magazine when I was a kid. These days I only use Linux since about 10 years back or so.

It's literally the only way to get away from big tech today.

Now post one without the shirt to be distro-agnostic.

To celebrate Slackware turning 30, I took off my shirt. My girlfriend and six people on the internet were super impressed by my slackware tattoo.