My history with Slackware Linux, part 1.

What is Slackware and why do I use it?  Slackware is the oldest currently maintained version of GNU/Linux out there.  My first exposure to it came in 1994 when Rhode Island College installed it as a dual boot in one of their computer labs because Netscape was available - at the time - only on Unix and GNU/Linux and they certainly couldn't afford Unix.

I'd been studying art and programming while working as a clerk typist.  My exposure to computers had usually been to the Mac or to MS-DOS/Windows (this was the transition era) or the VAX though I'd done one temp job where I could use any program I liked, so long as it was the Unix program vi.   Slackware changed my understanding of what an operating system does completely.  I knew it provided an interface between the applications programs we use and the hardware, but DOS and the Mac tried to coddle us while Slackware, being relatively Unix-like even then, was so austere I could watch and read documentation abut how my computer, which I was using that minute, did what I told it to.  I could only compare it to Underground Comix from the sixties: Volkerding, Torvalds and friends were reinventing computing the way Greg Irons, R. Crumb, Gilbert Sheldon, Rius et. al. had reinvented storytelling.  Further, a lot of the people I was reading about were involved in the Church of the Sub-Genius, which I knew from Science Fiction Fandom and WFMU.

At the same time it was not only advanced enough to play Doom on, the shareware version came with the distro (so people were playing it). The GUI was X-Windows,which I'd seen both at Brown and in Movies like War Games, and the only reason I didn't try to install it then was because after my computer broke I couldn't afford another.  I was definitely having fun.

I moved to New Hampshire after that and it was the new century before I could get another computer.  I was using Netscape at the library and using grex (www.cyberspace.org) to keep my skills from atrophying totally.  When I got a computer it had a cd-rom, which was a good thing.  Things like Linux.  In '94 you could even run it from a couple of floppies.  This was a cd/r not a cd/rw on a Windows 98 machine but it was god enough.  Given the options I went to Staples and bought a CD with Red Hat Linux 7.