warning: long-winded narrative, might bore you to death the gist. care to take a gander at an old file listing from the linux distribution network of fidonet zone 1 circa 1992? check it out at this url http://gra.ph/~xenos/linux.txt i snarfed this off FEBNews BBS which was then operated by Jonathan Marsden. this was way before any "distribution" of linux appeared on the scene. at the time, this was a roll-your-own ballgame. all the filenames are in 8.3 format because most fidonet systems were running DOS. some notes. Lilo, was non-existent then, so you usually had to have a boot floppy, or use "shoelace" to bootstrap into linux. other clues about what it was like in the early linux days can be gleamed from the listing itself. the story. being such a pack rat, i keep a lot of stuff from years and years ago in storage. the other night, i ran across a couple of boxes of old 5 1/4" diskettes. i went to look for an old drive that still seemed to be in working condition and dusted it off. i couldn't attach the drive to my current machine, monster, because my floppy ribbon cable doesn't have a connector for 5.25" drives... it only has those dinky little 3.5" connectors. so i went to my older box, mother, and lo and behold, it had the necessary cabling and connector. it -should-... after all, it used to house my second linux box ever. i powered mother down after alerting my brother to a temporary network outage while i attached the 5 inch to the box. a quick power up into the bios, twiddling with the settings so the 5 is recognized and i was bound into a portal that brought me back a decade or so. the whirr and clicking of the 5 was a welcome anachronistic murmur; only people who have lived through the longer loading times of cassette tape drives will know the delight of these slow ancient hulks. i unwrapped the mummies from their cartons and took one out of its paper sleeve. i inserted the floppy into the 5's mouth and turned the latch. i proceeded to instruct mother to read the old remnant: mother[/dev/pts/0]:~$ mount /dev/fd1 /floppy and opened the first cache of possibly unuseful archives from a decade past. my mind was reeling from the excitement of finding treasured clues from the past. i raced through the file listing and it held a cacophony of cryptic filenames: #4keen.zip #1wolf14.zip 4500tags.zip aieln.arj amag0289.zip amfv.lzh epza.cff pcdbbs.arj and a myriad of other files from that era past. some of the disks were goners, notably generics. the hardiest of the lot were Maxell, Goldstar and Verbatim diskettes. there was some value in using branded diskettes after all. i sifted through the boxes of diskettes and copied what was recoverable to a subdir on my home. i decided that i would go through their contents later. i came back with about 40MB worth of data from the dig. one box of diskettes contained Minix, which i had inherited from Dennis Velasco, the younger brother of my best friend in grade school and high school, Dean Velasco. i didn't bother to copy those to the subdir. i stored the box for further safekeeping. most of the files i recovered were in compressed archives. these were in zip, arj and lha formats mainly, but there were several in a format i no longer had the archiver for. cff was a variant of the lharc archival compression format which Kerwin Medina had developed and i had started to use for certain files. Kerwin is a Filipino software engineer who has since migrated to Canada (as far as i can tell). his cff archive format produced compression ratios for certain files that were more efficient than ZIP, LHA or ARJ at the time, which was why i used that on some of the files. alas, i no longer have his archiver program. perhaps i can scour the net later to find any existing copies. it took me a while to go through each of the files. i was a bit disappointed though since i was expecting some of the diskettes to contain linux filesystems with installation packages on them. then i spotted it. -rw------- 1 xenos xenos 8521 Apr 18 03:16 linuxlst.lzh fin ... p.s. okay... it may have bored most of you to tears, but that listing brings back some hints of what it was like in the early days of linux and i couldn't help but tell my story. eric ___ eric pareja ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) ~-=[O]=-~ Here, have a clue. Get the picture. \@/ PGP key at http://gra.ph/~xenos/xenos.pgp <|PLUG|> http://gra.ph v "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced." - Emperor Cleon in "Foundation's Fear" by Gregory Benford _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
