Surprised CompuServe Lasted This Long

You folks had more money than me. :(

I could never afford CI$. I had to settle for Delphi.

Darn, I'm trying to think where I might have put my ICQ number... wow, this is getting ear-y.

Found it: 73828758

Yep, y'all got me beat on ICQ, that's for sure.

In the mean time, I also found my copy of the Windows Entertainment Pack for Win3.1, and Word 2, and the BubbleGumCrisis mod pack for Duke Nuke'm.

...and 13 floppies for booting Debian 2.2, Aug. 2000.

Got you beat there too. I have MS-DOS 3 on two 5.25" floppies, along with Windows 1.03 on two 5.25" floppies. I've got the manuals and all. There was a separate manual for GW-BASIC (the one that still used line numbers). That taught me how to program.

@Bob_Robertson You Linux newbie. I still know where my copy of Yggdrasil Beta is, CD, manual and boot floppies. :-)

I, too, was a Compu$erve member, but I come not to praise it, but to bury it.

The owners of Compu$erve, AOL and Prodigy bear a huge responsibility: the death of Usenet. In '93, when all of those dorky services decided to let loose all their uneducated masses on Usenet, they ruined it. I shall forever hold a grudge against them for their bad decisions. And their inability to apologize for it. And the attitudes that led to the initial spam plague.

@Sander You spring chicken! I've got an Apple DOS 3.2 System Master 5.25" floppy... MS-DOS didn't even exist when that one came out... :-) I bet someone out there has a CP/M version that predates that though... I remember when I was the spring chicken instead of an old geezer. Sigh.

Janitor,

Are you sure it came on a CD?

Anyway, those boot floppies were for the laptop I retired last summer. Not the first Linux install I did. That was all 16 floppies of Debian .95

@phsolide I couldn't agree with you more regarding the death of Usenet.

@Bob_Robertson Yes it did, it was as far as I know the first distro available on CD. As far as I know SLS and Slackware were not available on CD until companies like InfoMagic started packaging them that way. I started ordering those as soon as they came out.

Neat, thanks. I know CD-ROM existed, because I had a SoundBlaster card-connected one myself, in 1990, the driver for which I see is still in the latest kernel.

But it would not boot through that CD-ROM. Win95 wasn't a boot disk either, because drivers hadn't been standardized I think.

One of the great "epic fails" of years past: putting the driver for the sound-card-based CD-ROM... on a CD-ROM.

It was in the Windows 95 days, so I can't remember who did it. But reading about it did give me a life lesson concerning "boot-strapping."

@Bob_Robertson I believe you are correct, that the CD included with the Yggdrasil package was not bootable. They included both a 5.25" and 3.5" floppy to boot from. I used the 5.25" floppy and installed onto a 386DX-20 which was cobbled together from a case salvaged from a dead Samsung 286, a motherboard bought from a friend who had recenty upgraded to a 486, RAM that was salvaged from an old Sun 2 and an Adaptec SCSI card and Seagate 300MB SCSI hard drive that were bought from a computer surplus liquidator. The SCSI hardware was Digital labeled and included DEC manuals. The case I had to modify with tin snips in order to fit a standard AT form factor motherboard into because the Samsung was proprietary. I also had to cut off the original and solder on the right motherboard power connector because Samsung used a non-standard connector. I think I only had a couple hundred bucks into the SCSI parts I bought... What you can buy for that now...

Oh yeah... the CD-ROM drive and sound card I installed from was an "Aztech" CD-ROM drive and one of the Soundblaster "Multi-CD" cards which had connectors for Sony, Phillips and one other. I forget now which connector the Aztech connected to. Too long ago.

I have an original IBM PC DOS 2.0, still in shrinkwrap. It looks exactly like the box on the right in this picture http://www.vintage-computer.com/images/pcsystem.jpg , with the exception of the missing shrinkwrap in the picture.

Sorry, ND, "404 File Not Found"

edit: Ah, thank you. I remember seeing those manuals. I, instead, bought a Tandy 1000.

I hate when that happens. Hold on, I'll edit the previous post when I find the proper URL.

[edit] Got it. The comma in the sentence was inadvertently included in the URL.

Quoting:The owners of Compu$erve, AOL and Prodigy bear a huge responsibility: the death of Usenet. In '93, when all of those dorky services decided to let loose all their uneducated masses on Usenet, they ruined it. I shall forever hold a grudge against them for their bad decisions. And their inability to apologize for it. And the attitudes that led to the initial spam plague.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

@gus Excellent link...

Fidonet, anyone?

Well, I had a compuserve account in 1992 but I can't remember the number. I do have some copies of slackware 2.3 (the last a.out version) laying around somewhere though.

@tuxchick I used to call a Fidonet BBS back around 1984-1986.