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Debian Software Businesses Red Hat Software Linux

Historic Linux File Archive Created 313

Posted by simoniker from the welcome-to-the-world-of-yesterday dept.
jemagid writes "Ibiblio (nee metalab, nee sunsite) has rummaged through all the old CDs and old FTP archives we could find, to put together a beautiful picture of the early days of the Linux community: Historic Linux. The files include snapshots of the early Linux archives including sunsite.unc.edu and tsx-11.mit.edu, and early distributions such as MCC (Manchester Computing Center) and SLS (Softlanding Linux Systems), which were some of the first attempts to make Linux easy to install and use. The early RedHat releases are also included, as is early Suse, Debian, Slackware, and Blade. The early distributions ran on machines as small as 386's with 2-4 MB of RAM, so these could be fun ways to resurrect ancient hardware."
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Historic Linux File Archive Created More

Historic Linux File Archive Created

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  • Uhh... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:02PM (#6903303) Homepage Journal

    The early distributions ran on machines as small as 386's with 2-4 MB of RAM, so these could be fun ways to resurrect ancient hardware.

    I certainly hope no one intends on putting these old versions on the net lest they become a w4r3z server or DDoS drone..

    • Re:Uhh... Really? (Score:5, Funny)

      by JiffyPop ( 318506 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:09PM (#6903384)
      I don't imagine there are many warez servers with 2MB RAM and 100MB free HD space... Besides that, I would think that as many versions as the underlying libraries have gone through that current cracking tools wouldn't know what to do with something so outdated.

      Maybe you should create an archive of old Linux cracking tools just to even the playing field?
    • Of course you'd have to apply security patches that would take you up to 2.4.22. ;-)

    • Re:Uhh...they would need.. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by gosand ( 234100 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:50PM (#6903802)
      I certainly hope no one intends on putting these old versions on the net lest they become a w4r3z server or DDoS drone.


      Wouldn't they need a working TCP/IP stack for that? :-)

  • Beautiful Picture? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hayzeus ( 596826 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:02PM (#6903310) Homepage
    I remember trying to install from those same SLS diskette images downloaded from Rusty 'n Edie's at 9600 baud. It was not a pretty picture.

    • Re:Beautiful Picture? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kaszeta ( 322161 ) <rich@kaszeta.org> on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:08PM (#6903381) Homepage
      I remember trying to install from those same SLS diskette images downloaded from Rusty 'n Edie's at 9600 baud. It was not a pretty picture.

      Indeed, I still have a whole shoebox of floppies that (if they can still be read) consist of the current Slackware version in 1993/94. I managed to get many a free meal in exchange for letting folks borrow the box to do a Linux install. Those were the days.

      Then again, I've got better museum pieces than that, including a 486 still running Debian 0.93R5 (that even made 666 days of uptime in '96 or '97 before a power outage took it out), although it doesn't really do much other than sit there. Doing anything with it stopped being the point a long time ago...

      But really, it's rather interesting that someone is still keeping these old dists around, it's interesting to see what happened when.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:14PM (#6903450)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Beautiful Picture? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Havokmon ( 89874 ) <rick&havokmon,com> on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:25PM (#6903562) Homepage Journal
      I remember trying to install from those same SLS diskette images downloaded from Rusty 'n Edie's at 9600 baud. It was not a pretty picture.

      Umm YEAH Beautiful Pictures!

      Apparently you weren't looking in the right section of Rusty 'n Edie's BBS ;)

    • I downloaded my SLS Linux .99pl12 distribution at 2400 bps over two days. When the download finished, I found that most of my floppy images had checksum errors.

      Fortunately, Jana publications imploded the next day, and started hemorrhaging CDs everywhere. I managed to get one and was up and running a few days later.

      At about the same time, I had a borrowed Sun 3/110 runing SunOS 3.x. It was fun to play with the big old sun, but even then Linux seemed much faster and more modern. It didn't hurt that Linu
    • Heh heh -- My employer at the time was fat-pipe connected and one of the Sun machines had a floppy drive.
      I downloaded the SLS floppies from tsx-11 over the course of a few days, then dd'ed them to a giant stack of floppies.
      When all was said and done, the cobbled-together 386 (with 387-16 co-pro! w00t!) had a whopping 4Meg of ram and a 120Meg hard drive, but it ran X windows, dialed in at 2400b via SLIP, and registered itself on the work network.
      NFS over dialup, on the other hand, wasn't that great of a

  • This is great to see. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CrackHappy ( 625183 ) * on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:03PM (#6903316) Journal
    You know, it's always wonderful to see this kind of effort going into preserving some of the history of our technological society.

    It was great to browse through some of these pages and see how our community has changed. As a recent convert to Linux (Mandrake), it's very interesting to see how distributions have changed over the years.

    Great job!

  • "...fun ways to resurrect ancient hardware." (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ummmm, no,

    Let it go.

  • Modern distros on old hardware (Score:5, Interesting)

    by i.r.id10t ( 595143 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:05PM (#6903337)
    Modern distros on old hardware still work - I've got a 486sx33 laptop with 4mb ram (Toshiba Satellite 1910) that had Slack 7.0 and 7.1 on it. I upped the ram to 12mb and it now is a fairly useful machine with Slack 8.1 on it.

    • Re:Modern distros on old hardware (Score:5, Informative)

      by admbws ( 600017 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:15PM (#6903459) Homepage Journal
      Slackware recently dropped support for i386, as the ChangeLog explains [mirror.ac.uk] (scroll down and look for the new GCC 3.3 packages):
      Added the following test packages that we're not ready to merge in yet:
      testing/packages/gcc-3.3/gcc-3.3-i486-1.tgz: This is GCC 3.3, compiled for
      a minimum CPU target of i486. Why i486 and not i386? Because the shared
      C++ libraries in gcc-3.2.x will require 486 opcodes even when a 386 target
      is used (so we already weren't compatible with the i386 for Slackware 9.0
      and nobody noticed :-). gcc-3.3 fixes this issue and allows you to build a
      386 compiler, but the fix is done in a way that produces binaries that are
      not compatible with gcc-3.2.x compiled binaries and which suffer a
      performance hit. To retain compatibility with Slackware 9.0, we'll have to
      use i486 (or better) as the compiler target for gcc-3.3. Therefore, it is
      time to say goodbye to i386 support in Slackware. I've surveyed 386 usage
      online, and the most common thing I see people say when someone asks about
      running Linux on a 386 is to "run Slackware", but then they also usually go
      on to say "be sure to get an OLD version, like 4.0, before glibc, because
      it'll be more efficient." Now, if that's the general advice, then I see no
      reason to continue 386 support in the latest Slackware (and indeed it's no
      longer easily possible). People with 386 machines aren't going to have the
      hard drive space for Slackware 9.1 in any case.

      • Re:Modern distros on old hardware (Score:4, Informative)

        by volkerdi ( 9854 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:27PM (#6903575)
        Slackware recently dropped support for i386...

        This is true, but I suspect most of the packages would run on a 386 anyway (but haven't tested this, as the olde-original-slackware-devel-box is mothballed somewhere in the garage). Most of the kernels wouldn't boot on a 386 though, so you'd need to compile your own. The "lowmem.i" kernel is a notable exception.

        BTW, said "old development box": Packard Bell 386SX16/4MB. Glad I'm not using that anymore.
    • I have an IBM 486 25 with 20MB ram and a 220 MB hdd running Slack 9.0, and that's with 40MB swap, so really only 180 usable MB hdd.

      It's where I write all my Perl.

    • "Modern distros on old hardware still work."

      With Redhat 9, the sound card and video card in my desktop don't work as well as they did with my RH4 distribution. Some days I am this close -->||<-- to reinstalling it.

      I have seen complaints that Linux users are too resistant to change. Well, it worked, and now it doesn't, so why did somebody change it? And yes, I have looked at some of the source code to try to find the problem, but there is no documentation in the code or explication of the code

      • Uh, the "resistant to change" part refers to you, still using the same sound card and video card you had when RH4 came out.

      • Re:Modern distros on old hardware (Score:4, Interesting)

        by IM6100 ( 692796 ) <elben@mentar.org> on Monday September 08, 2003 @06:16PM (#6905190)
        The XFree86 folks decided awhile ago to start abandoning support of older video hardware. So, what ends up happening is that older video cards, that worked fine, start to quit working. I have a nice expensive (for the time) STB Video card that they abandoned awhile back. It uses the S3Trio64 chip. Most of the early S3 video cards are now abandoned by XFree86. It's ironic, because STB was one of the few PC Graphics card makers who were actual members of the X Consortium.

        We used to make fun of Microsoft for abandoning old hardware, and it used to be a pround rallying point for Linux folk that Microsoft 'gave free hardware to Linux' by abandoning support for it.

        Nowadays when I mention things like this about, for instance, Xfree86 abandoning old hardware, or the KDE/Gnome bloat making older machines useless, I get the same comments ("get new hardware!") from Linux zealots that we in the Linux community used to expect from the Microsoft zealots.

        Times sure change.

    • I run Debian sarge on a 486sx25 Compaq Contura Aero, with 24MB of RAM (...which the thing isn't supposed to support) and an 810MB HDD. I used to use a 12MB 486sx33 Aero, with a ~250MB disk but it eventually died.

      No, I don't run X - but emacs, perl, g++, vgaspect and kismet (with SVGATextMode) all work.
    • I remember trying to get an early version of Slackware running on a 386SX16 with 2Mb of RAM. I let it boot for 2 days while it was thrashing the disks, before I killed it. With 4Mb it ran like a dream.

      I can't remember what version of Slackware it was, but I still have a bunch of the disks lying around. The odd times when I need a blank floppy and dig through my floppies to grab an old one I am always hesitant to grab one labeled A1 or N3... Instead I grab the 'Win95 boot disk' instead :)

  • Memories... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tsa ( 15680 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:06PM (#6903352) Homepage
    Slackware 3.1 is there to be found. That must be the second version of Slackware I installed. In that time I have a 25 MHz 486 with 8 MB of RAM, which was pretty fast considering the specs (I also had a 80 MHz AMD 486). Those were the days... Well I must say I'm glad we moved on :-)

    • Slackware 3.1 is there to be found. That must be the second version of Slackware I installed. In that time I have a 25 MHz 486 with 8 MB of RAM, which was pretty fast considering the specs (I also had a 80 MHz AMD 486). Those were the days... Well I must say I'm glad we moved on :-)

      I honestly don't remember what my first version of Slackware was, except that it came on a CD in the back of the first edition of Slackware Unleashed, back in 1997. It worked fine on my 486/66 with 8 MB RAM. And it feels lik

      • I honestly don't remember what my first version of Slackware was, except that it came on a CD in the back of the first edition of Slackware Unleashed, back in 1997. It worked fine on my 486/66 with 8 MB RAM. And it feels like so long ago...

        Similar thing here ... I think it was slackware 3.0 that I received with my copy of "Linux Unleashed" 2nd edition. Was running Win 3.1 on a 486-33 with 8MB RAM dual booting to linux on my second 420MB hard drive.

        Was fun ... played with it a bit but did not get serio

  • a fun way to resurrect ancient hardware... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:06PM (#6903355) Journal
    ... would be to put something new on it, something the designers of the time would never have concieved. Like the hacking community around the atari 2600 or colecovision, or getting the C64 internet ready with its own ip stack. Make it do something it wasn't meant to do.

    Running a 10 year old linux on a 10 year old computer is just as interesting as running DOS or Win3.0 on it, though only half as useful. (Mod me down if you must, but linux was still very much a toy for comp sci students back then)

    • Re:a fun way to resurrect ancient hardware... (Score:5, Informative)

      by leandrod ( 17766 ) <l.dutras@org> on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:30PM (#6903613) Homepage Journal
      >
      Running a 10 year old linux on a 10 year old computer is just as interesting as running DOS or Win3.0 on it, though only half as useful. (Mod me down if you must, but linux was still very much a toy for comp sci students back then)

      Not really. While GNU/Linux was nowhere nearly as useful as it is today, it could already do things MS Windows can't do today. More importantly, it did so with decent performance and reliability and a compatible API, what means you probably can run much modern software there. Now try running modern software on MS Windows 3.0, or even finding old software to run on it...

    • but linux was still very much a toy for comp sci students back then

      Linux had a very compitent TCP/IP stack, including SLIP and later PPP. Combine that with X11 and a Mosaic binary, and you had a fast and reliable Websurfer. Even at 14.4k bps.

      As for the biz side, in 1993 I replaced a big IBM RS6000/530 with a dual proc Pentium 100 running Linux. Since there were about 100 dumb terminals on the system, IBM wanted around $100k for an OS upgrade. The Linux box was roughly twice as fast as the aging IBM a

    • Running a 10 year old linux on a 10 year old computer is just as interesting as running DOS or Win3.0 on it, though only half as useful. (Mod me down if you must, but linux was still very much a toy for comp sci students back then)

      Wrong! I have a 33Mhz 486 DX w/8MB of RAM running two meters at my left. It runs Debian Woody 3 (no old distro) and XFree4. When I'm working w/someone else I boot it up and launch ssh or X remotely.

      I can use a GNOME2 session in that box w/o no problem (scrolling is a little s

  • Linux Internet Archives (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sfbanutt ( 116292 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:07PM (#6903364) Homepage
    I actually have a 6 CD set from Yggdrasilof the 'Linux Internet Archives Winter 1996'. That's about the time when things were starting to become usable by mere mortals.
    • I think I still have as well. And the 5 CD set from the year before. I'll have to dig the source for 'Abuse' out and recompile.

      I haven't played that in years...

    • I actually have a 6 CD set from Yggdrasilof the 'Linux Internet Archives Winter 1996'.

      I still have single CD labeled "Yggdrasil GNU/Linux/X11 Fall '93". This is the oldest CD-based distribution that I have at home. Before that, I used the SLS floppies but I have recycled these floppies in the meantime.

      Saying that all Linux distributions had some rough edges in 1993 would be an understatement, but I was able to play with them on my old 486/33 with a mere 20 MB of disk space. The Yggdrasil CD had a n

      • I still have the Yggdrasil Fall 94 CD. It got me through a couple of UNIX courses. It was amazing at the time. It kept me from having to drive out to the computer lab or attempt a remote (VERY slow) connection via modem.

        Sure, these old distros had their rough edges, but consider the alternative. Does anyone remember the kind of hoops you had to jump through to get a Win 3.xx system online? Anyone remember Trumpet?

  • Hardware (Score:5, Funny)

    by jargoone ( 166102 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:08PM (#6903372)
    The early distributions ran on machines as small as 386's with 2-4 MB of RAM"

    Damn! Time to upgrade again!

  • way back... (Score:5, Funny)

    by zapp ( 201236 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:09PM (#6903385)
    before ls had color?!?! ;)
  • ...in 10 or 15 years

  • The REAL value of this... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DickBreath ( 207180 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:11PM (#6903405) Homepage
    The real value of this is to have an archive of the entire development history and community. Out there in the open for all to see. Right there in front of God and everyone. It will help protect Linux from future SCO's.

  • If you REALLY want to enable old hardware... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sleepy ( 4551 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:16PM (#6903460) Homepage
    Don't mess with one of these old distributions. Seriously... things were broken in the old days, and often you had a bear of a time even figuring out what was wrong.

    And good luck getting any answers!

    If you want to go through the pain of this for HISTORICAL value... do so if you really really want to. Just don't put it on the net, ok? :-)

    If the intent is to squeeze some practical value out of an old system, then ignore these old distros and get something made for the job. One of the "Linux on a floppy" or "peanut" Linux distros would do nicely.

    A really fun exercise would be "porting" all of today's "modern" Bash scripts to run on an embedded or stripped-down system.. nothing works because everyone uses the newer Bash coding styles (while still specifying the script as /bin/sh grrr...).

    A system built around BusyBox and dietlibc is pretty minimal. Just expect to learn a lot of the "old" command switches, and other workarounds...
  • ah, those were the days. 13 3.5" floppies painstakingly downloaded and dd'd onto floppies with and AIX box.

  • Why no Yggdrasil Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mTor ( 18585 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:19PM (#6903492)
    That's a great page but I just noticed that they don't have any Yggdrasil [wikipedia.org] Linux distributions. Yggdrasil was the very first Linux distribution I installed and I always get a warm feeling when I see anything related to it.

    Does anyone know where to find a comprehensive archive of Yggdrasil distributions?

  • I went to Manchester (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:21PM (#6903513)
    While I was there, Microsoft bunged a MASSIVE load of cash to Manchester computing centre.

    Sad really, they ripped out a load of perfectly good sun workstations in my department and put in (then-new) windows nt 4.0 workstation boxes. Nothing worked right after that, but at least MCC got to employ 3x its former staff. :-(

    I wondered why MS targeted MCC so completely (it wasn't until years later they started targeting the Oxbridge crowd) - they must have been out to kill GNU and Linux even then.

  • Debian Archive.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by molo ( 94384 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:21PM (#6903515) Journal
    For those that don't know, there is Debian Archive [debian.org] of older versions. I think ibiblio has this beat with 0.91 Beta though (Jan 94).

    -molo

  • hey, debian! (Score:3, Funny)

    by jesperht ( 650842 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:22PM (#6903527) Journal
    Wow, and i wondered where they got all the stuff for stable/woddy...

  • Huh? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:25PM (#6903553) Homepage
    The early distributions ran on machines as small as 386's with 2-4 MB of RAM, so these could be fun ways to resurrect ancient hardware."

    Hmm, I'm running 2.6 Rc1 right now on a 386 with 4mb ram...

    why do I need an old distro to run linux on really slow or old hardware??

    that has always been the magic of linux... pure scalability. and it takes 10 minutes to roll your own single floppy distro.

  • Why do that ? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:29PM (#6903606) Journal
    If you want a taste of old Linux then use Debian. Jeeze.

  • Linux Pictures (Score:4, Funny)

    by akiaki007 ( 148804 ) <aa316@@@nyu...edu> on Monday September 08, 2003 @03:29PM (#6903607)
    Anyone else see [ibiblio.org] these [ibiblio.org] pictures [ibiblio.org] on the servers? hehehe, I wonder when these were taken.
  • Just because one is monoglot^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hanglophone it doesn't mean one shouldn't try to write accents when necessary... nee doesn't mean anything, the French word meaning born being nee in the feminine, masculine ne.
  • My first Yggdrasil CD.

    Ahh, the fond memories of trying to find a SCSI card and CD disk drive that was supported. It ran on my third "real" machine, a 386-33 with 8 megs, may it RIP.

  • Historic Linux? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Spudley ( 171066 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @04:15PM (#6904080) Homepage Journal
    Historic Linux? Hmmm.... what should we call it?

    How about "Old Hat Linux" ? :-D

    -- ba-ching! --
  • Ah, the nestalgia, I'm almost tearing up. I remember when I was putting together the Tucows Linuxburg site (now Tucows Linux, can't speak for the quality now, haven't been with Tucows for three years) I used to visit Metalab several times a day. Before Freshmeat there was only one place to get your gear kiddies. Real men used Metalab! How I miss those days. I went through every directory on Metalab to build Linuxberg! What a great site!

  • What sucks is (Score:2, Informative)

    by astyanax ( 8365 )
    that the date stamps are not preserved. I was looking at the old SLS distributions and all the date stamps say September 2003. You want to see 199[1234] for it to be really 3117 retro :)

  • This is interesting, because I was just searching for some old BSD archives the other day. The reason was, some NZ orgs have been threatened with patent infringment on "a system that encrypts/decripts to a database on a separate server" -- immediately I thought of the old practice of using Rot13 in combination with usenet news (net.jokes) to obfuscate potentially offensive jokes -- well, they didn't say how strong the encryption had to be in order to qualify as "encryption."

    The matter of concern was

  • I think it might be time to go digging for the redhat installer version which had Redneck as a language choice. Go easter eggs!

    "Y'all sure ya be wantin' to be overwritin' them thar partitions? Y'all won't be gittin' much data back off 'em after."

    • Re:Redneck Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cant_get_a_good_nick ( 172131 ) on Monday September 08, 2003 @05:51PM (#6904938)
      Wasn't quite an easter egg; it was both out in the open, and had a use. That was there first version of their installer that supported multiple languages. At that time, they didn't have translators to do a polished second language, so they came up with Redneck. I always installed in Redneck, and put them thar shiny thing in that fancy cupholder tray.

      I doubt if "corporate" RedHat would do this now. I doubt if many folks shelling out $2500 for Linux [redhat.com] would appreciate the beauty that is Redneck.

  • I suppose the Edmund Hilary justification works for making a 386 run linux. But at this point, there is really no economic reason to use that old of hardware. At this point the hardware you can get for free is late model pentiums or early pentium IIs.

    I suppose the other reason to use older hardware is because it is more stylish...but the 386s usually came in big big bulky boxes that weren't that attractive.

    There is enough old computer hardware out there that its not really even that original to do

  • Pointless nostalgia (Score:2, Insightful)

    by daveho ( 235543 )
    I started out running Linux in January of 1994, using MCC on my 25MHz 486SX with 4 MB of RAM. I think the entire distribution was about 7 or 8 1.44 MB floppies, which I painstakingly downloaded using bitftp. (Yes, I was on bitnet. If you don't know what bitnet was, be very grateful).

    The machine was too underpowered to run X comfortably (although I did play around a bit with TinyX - made the machine swap like nobody's business); however, I hooked up my VT102 terminal in order to have separate vi and bash
    • I started out running Linux in January of 1994, using MCC on my 25MHz 486SX with 4 MB of RAM. I think the entire distribution was about 7 or 8 1.44 MB floppies, which I painstakingly downloaded using bitftp.

      Well, I started in December of 1992, on a 33 MHz 486DX with 16MB of RAM. The distribution I used was called SNOW and was on about 25 floppies. It included X.

      In fact, X ran quite well on this machine, and with its 800 MB SCSI disk that soared at 2.5 Mbyte/s it was a high-end box for those days. It
  • I wouldn't call a 386 ancient...

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