whych

First started when I bought a book on learning linux in around 96. The included cd was slackware 1.x.
You had to know every piece of hardware and what irq it used to get everything to work, and then linux would probably only run on an old pc that had had all the hardware drivers reverse engineered due to lack of vendor support.
X-windows ran like a dog, even on faster (486!) pc's. To get netscape running, you compiled your own.
In fact you even compiled your own hardware specific kernel after install, to save memory and drive space.
I then moved to redhat and suse and still like suse, despite playing around with other distros.
How things have changed, most linux distros will auto-detect everything and install perfectly, something not even windows can do.
After supporting windows based servers and networks professionally, I have moved everything to linux and have been windows-free for around 2 years now.
Looking at all the linux counter sigs makes me feel old - my reg number is 66197.