I knew a guy in high school (1997) who was talking about this thing called Linux. It was a super complex operating system and didn't even have a graphical interface. Our thinking was if we managed to install it we'd be geniuses or something. After a few days we got it installed on his PC, but i'd yet to install it myself.
Unfortuantly the only computer I had (not counting the family PC) was a laptop with 4MB of RAM (effectively less than 4). The installation required booting one floppy disk containing the kernel, then swapping and loading another disk containing the installer. And course the machine ran out of memory during this process. I spent days learning how to compile a custom kernel that excluded the things I didn't need, until it was small enough to fit in memory and succesfully install it.
Unfortuantly the only computer I had (not counting the family PC) was a laptop with 4MB of RAM (effectively less than 4). The installation required booting one floppy disk containing the kernel, then swapping and loading another disk containing the installer. And course the machine ran out of memory during this process. I spent days learning how to compile a custom kernel that excluded the things I didn't need, until it was small enough to fit in memory and succesfully install it.
I think that's when I got hooked.