About the same era I was working on my industry year at a UK computer company. I was mostly working with the spiffy new Pentiums, but had a spare 486 machine to play with Linux. The complete SLS (I think, though it may have been Slackware) fitted nicely onto a box of 3.5" disks (50 in total?)
Downloading it was a nightmare though - there was no TCP/IP connection available to me, but I could use the X.25 based email package. Attachments weren't an option, but you could send email to a file hosting server (funet.fi perhaps?) and it would split the requested file into as many 64K UUEncoded emails as necessary in response. Reassembling them (given the clunky email software I was working with) was a distressingly manual process... but I eventually collated and copied the complete set of disk images to floppy and installed them on the lavish 100Mb drive of the 486.
I also recall the fun (?) of trying to get the right monitor sync info for the XConfig file, and the superstition of `sync; sync; sync` that must have been long out-dated by the time I actually got my hands on this machine (though I did play around a little with the boot/root disk combination before that).
I sometimes feel a pang of nostalgia for all that stuff, but you can take my 1Gb network connection, hidpi monitor, and multi-terrabyte SSDs out of my cold dead hands!
Edit: Afterthought to give a little extra perspective on when this was: Around the same time I signed up for a Beta program on some Microsoft projects and boxed copies (with manuals) of "Daytona" and "Chicago" turned up in the post!
Downloading it was a nightmare though - there was no TCP/IP connection available to me, but I could use the X.25 based email package. Attachments weren't an option, but you could send email to a file hosting server (funet.fi perhaps?) and it would split the requested file into as many 64K UUEncoded emails as necessary in response. Reassembling them (given the clunky email software I was working with) was a distressingly manual process... but I eventually collated and copied the complete set of disk images to floppy and installed them on the lavish 100Mb drive of the 486.
I also recall the fun (?) of trying to get the right monitor sync info for the XConfig file, and the superstition of `sync; sync; sync` that must have been long out-dated by the time I actually got my hands on this machine (though I did play around a little with the boot/root disk combination before that).
I sometimes feel a pang of nostalgia for all that stuff, but you can take my 1Gb network connection, hidpi monitor, and multi-terrabyte SSDs out of my cold dead hands!
Edit: Afterthought to give a little extra perspective on when this was: Around the same time I signed up for a Beta program on some Microsoft projects and boxed copies (with manuals) of "Daytona" and "Chicago" turned up in the post!