Patrick Volkerding is a BDFL, (Benevolent Dictator For Life), one of quite a few in the open source world. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life
Heh... I've heard the expression before but clicked your link.
Story Time With KGIII (and it's even on-topic):
Matt Mullenweg is on the list, of WordPress fame, which I kinda expected once I started scrolling.
There are estimates that WordPress powers about 1/3 of all public-facing websites (in part or in whole).
I used b2 before WordPress came along. Man, back in the day it was expensive to find a hosting company that even had PHP as an option. Finding Perl as an option (CGI - common gateway interface) was more common - and less expensive. So, I used to be able to smash out a bit of Perl, but I digress.
Here's a quote from Wikipedia's WordPress page:
"WordPress is among the most popular content management systems – it was used by 42.8% of the top 10 million websites as of October 2021."
Now, back to the subject...
I believe I got Red Hat from a book that came with a CD. I'm pretty sure it was a CD, though I think the bookstore had an option with floppies.
My memory is a bit dim at this next stage...
My first exposure to Slackware was on floppies. This wasn't my first exposure to free software. There was lots of 'freeware' out at the time. By graces, I was already familiar with the free software movement. For better or worse, I went to school with one of the 'founders' of free software and one of the greatest proponents.
Anyhow...
I don't remember how many floppy disks it was, but it was a bunch. The person that gave them to me did so willingly and literally gave them to me. They didn't charge me any money, because they were now a disciple of free software and all that it entailed.
I dimly recall testing it. I remember being baffled by the installation process. The concept of telling the format process what to do was intense, to say the least. As I recall, I even had to specify the specific sector of the disk - by number - for both the start and end. I also had to leave room and make a bunch of partitions. I'd done some of this in the past, but this process was difficult for me.
It didn't come with a manual. It came with a bunch of printed out notes - old dot matrix printer paper, as memory serves. These were notes made by the person who gave me all these Slackware installation disks.
At least I'm pretty sure that's how the story went. I could be mixing it up with Red Hat.
I remember finally getting the OS installed and tinkering with it for a few weeks on a spare computer. It ran well enough, but I didn't find it all that useful - or as easily useful - as Windows 95 or 98 (or whatever I was using at the time). It tweaked my inner geek, but I really wasn't able to get that much use out of it for what I was doing at the time on desktop computers.
I've played with Slackware a number of times since, but I'm definitely not a Slackware user.
I still have great respect for the distro. I still love that Slackware exists, and it's great that it has existed this long. I might have to have a glass or two of wine and install Slackware in a VM, just to play with it again.
Out above my garage are boxes full of crap that I kept from before this house was built. In that pile of crap are some old bits and bobs of computer history that seemed important at the time. I don't know if they still exist, but that's where those disks would be all these years later.
(I was not in the habit of re-using disks.)
Someday, some poor sap will have been hired by my heirs to clean that junk out of there to dispose of it properly. They might just find themselves a bunch of disks to install an early version of Slackware.
Again, my memory is pretty poor and this was many years ago.
I do remember Knopix a bit better, 'cause it booted to a GUI and ate my MBR even though I never mounted any disks. I was less than impressed.
debugpointnews.com
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