Unless you were in BFE, there were options for getting Linux delivered in the mid 90s.
I know I bought a Red hat 4 (not to be confused with RHEL) CD in the late 90s from some mail order thing.
This was actually “fill out a form and mail it”. And they offered legit nearly every major distro. I think they even sold printed out copies of HOWTOs.
But it was quite cheap. Iirc it wasn’t much more than postage and a small fee to cover time and materials.
And I paid C.O.D.
This wasn’t a secret…I think I found the site either from usenet or EFnet #linux… but it wasn’t like going to CompUSA.
I also remember seeing Walnut Creek FreeBSD and Slackware CDs at a nearby flea market (Flea@MIT) around then, too. Probably also the computer fairs as well.
In Sweden there were computer magazines that came with a CD-ROM that had at least one new Linux distro on it with every issue. I had so much fun trying them all out on my computer and noting down what I liked the best with each of them.
Sometimes when I was home alone for an extended period of time, I used to install a distro on the shared family computer as well, to use as a router and have the feeling of running a real server (so far I had only experienced UNIX/Linux servers via restricted shells on public services over dialup, but never as root…).
Before the family returned home I would reinstall Windows 95 and they would be none the wiser. At least I think so…
Unless you were in BFE, there were options for getting Linux delivered in the mid 90s.
I know I bought a Red hat 4 (not to be confused with RHEL) CD in the late 90s from some mail order thing.
This was actually “fill out a form and mail it”. And they offered legit nearly every major distro. I think they even sold printed out copies of HOWTOs.
But it was quite cheap. Iirc it wasn’t much more than postage and a small fee to cover time and materials.
And I paid C.O.D.
This wasn’t a secret…I think I found the site either from usenet or EFnet #linux… but it wasn’t like going to CompUSA.
I also remember seeing Walnut Creek FreeBSD and Slackware CDs at a nearby flea market (Flea@MIT) around then, too. Probably also the computer fairs as well.
In Sweden there were computer magazines that came with a CD-ROM that had at least one new Linux distro on it with every issue. I had so much fun trying them all out on my computer and noting down what I liked the best with each of them.
Sometimes when I was home alone for an extended period of time, I used to install a distro on the shared family computer as well, to use as a router and have the feeling of running a real server (so far I had only experienced UNIX/Linux servers via restricted shells on public services over dialup, but never as root…).
Before the family returned home I would reinstall Windows 95 and they would be none the wiser. At least I think so…