[ale] Ancient desktop

[Jon "maddog" Hall]

>Just the simple change from "running this may destroy your
>monitor" to "it just works out of the box" for X is huge.
Much of this was due to the change of ISA bus to PCI bus and the associated
changes to the functionality of the hardware.

There was not much information handed back when the CPU probed a card on
the ISA bus, so you had to edit the config file to supply that information.

The monitor being destroyed was mostly due to lack of power limiting
circuitry.  As the scan rate increased more and more power was pulled
through the circuitry eventually heating it up to flames.   This happened
more times after the monitor was separated from the system it was designed
for and was paired with other controller boards which would attempt to
drive it at higher scan rates.   Later "multi-scan" monitors eliminated
that problem.

md

On Tue, May 9, 2023 at 1:23 PM Jim Kinney via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> Ah. Old slackware floppy images. Needed 7 to get a working OS plus enough
> network bits to use the modem and get more.
>
> I LITERALLY learned scripting because my wife would pick up the phone to
> see if I was online :-)
> I could get 1 floppy per night.
> Now I can get 5gbps into my house.
>
> Kids these days have no idea how much easier things are now. Just the
> simple change from "running this may destroy your monitor" to "it just
> works out of the box" for X is huge.
>
> On Tue, May 9, 2023, 10:24 AM Boris Borisov via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>
>> There is some ancient stuff here:
>>
>> https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/
>>
>>
>> On Tue, May 9, 2023, 10:07 Boris Borisov <bugyatl at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> slackware.cs.utah.edu
>>>
>>> On Tue, May 9, 2023, 10:05 DJPfulio--- via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 5/9/23 07:31, Jim Kinney via Ale wrote:
>>>> > I'm gonna look at the v 1.3 I found in their downloads. My testing of
>>>> > it was from '95-97 time frame. Many thanks!
>>>> >
>>>>
>>>> I kept an old Walnut Creek 6-disc Linux collection. Used to buy $15
>>>> updates from Microcenter every 6 months during most of the 1990s.
>>>>
>>>> Can probably find a Slackware 0.96 disc somewhere here.  I didn't have
>>>> a CDROM at the time, so I'd buy 50 floppies and stay late at work to use
>>>> the CDROM drive on my workstation there to build the floppies from the
>>>> CDROM.
>>>>
>>>> I was living outside Houston then and it was a 45min drive on Sunday
>>>> morning to get to the "PC area" of town. It was a full day to head over
>>>> there and visit NewEgg, Microcenter, CompUSA, and a few others that have
>>>> long died.
>>>>
>>>> Life these days with Linux is 1000x easier.
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