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Holy CRAP, am I literally the oldest person here?
CP/M, with the 8" disks
Then DOS -> Windows -> Linux (Mandrake, then tried a few different ones, then Debian and stuck with Debian)
I started with the last version of DOS, 6.2, on PC.
Unless you count the Amstrad CPC464 I had before that? Ran on tapes, disks were futuristic!
Which of us is older? I’m not sure it natters. What matters is that the kids will never understand the elegance of a command line interface or of running out of memory to store your code.
Haha yeah I did some tapes. There was some crazy thing that hooked up to my TV at home that used cassette tapes.
And yeah, BBS culture, and programming on some of the old school machines, PEEK and POKE and pre-OSX Macs, and segmented memory in the 8088-286 era. To this day I have never really understood what the point of segmented memory was, but that was what we had back in the day, and we were grateful.
I also got to do some programming at a place that had one of the massive Onyx2 machines. It lived in a whole separate room and was the size of a refrigerator. Good stuff.
some crazy thing that hooked up to my TV at home that used cassette tapes.
Sounds like my first computer, Tandy Color Computer from Radio Shack. Had it hooked to the TV via RF, & learned to program in BASIC.
Ah, the precious main memory… Let’s see if we can’t get this mouse driver to load in upper memory to save me some precious main memory…
Yep, and then DOS 5 coming in like space program technology, that could put the whole OS in high memory and give you 640 kb all for the user programs. And it had a DISK CACHE (which for the most part didn’t work).
Godlike I tell you
😃
You’re probably about my age. I was just late getting into computers. First attempt at university was dumb terminals connected to some Unix host. Failed everything and dropped out. Went back a few years later and had 8086 based PCs booting DOS off diskettes.
My first program was written on a CDC 6600 I think. Oh wait that was college. In high school we had a TRS-80 a decwriter connected to a PDP-11 at the local university. We had to do some programs with punch cards. One was just for a history lesson. The other time was I decided to take COBOL which was offered through the business school and that was punch cards only. I actually had access to COBOL at work which didn’t require punch cards. And I wrote a really simple file transfer program and used a machine running CP/M to transfer the file. They told me I had to use key punches.
Yooo
I am jealous, PDP-11 is the real deal. I was early enough to see some punch cards but I was not involved with them.
You’ve got me beat. I’ve only seen 8" disks in coworkers “check out this shit” collection.
Back when floppies were floppy. Did they then pull out all their reel to reel tapes? Used to have stacks of those.
I have actually used a reel to reel, but it’s cheating because it was military gear and it was probably left over from the Vietnam era.
Edit: apparently early 80’s. Scary. That thing felt ancient in 1991.
apple2c, commadore64
Commodore 64 here, too.
First Linux distro was Ubuntu.
samesies
MS-DOS 5.0
- Commodore 64 (kernal)
- Amiga OS
- MS-DOS 3.2, 5.0
- Windows 3.1
- Slackware Linux
- Windows NT 4
- RedHat Linux
- Windows XP
- Ubuntu Linux
- Windows 7
- Windows 10
- Rasbian
- PopOS
Roughly in order of appearance. Personal devices only. I used many more for work.
I’m probably on the younger side of Lemmy, my first OS was Windows 98, but the first one I truly remember using is XP.
When I really started getting into computers, our family PC was running Vista, and the first nerdy thing I remember doing was trying to “downgrade” that computer to XP. My parents were none too pleased when they saw that the PC wouldn’t boot, thinking I had bricked it. It took me about a week to getting XP running properly, and that feeling of satisfaction is what started my love for tinkering with computers (I’m definitely a noob compared to the average Lemmy user, though).
Afterwards, I fell into the Apple fanboy pipeline and begged my parents for a MacBook. I was a huge Mac nerd, even saving up money as a teen for an iMac, until I started wanting to game more on PC, especially with friends on Steam. I then started dual-booting, initially XP but then Windows 7, and eventually I realized I was never booting into my Mac partition. I played around very occasionally with dual-booting Linux as well, Ubuntu and then Linux Mint, but this was more for computer nerd clout than a genuine need or interest for libre software, also the command line scared me and I still played too many games to main a Linux distro.
I then built a PC for gaming, and ran Windows 7 on it until around 2 years ago when I got really into FOSS and switched to EndeavourOS which is what I’ve been happily using ever since. I’ve always enjoyed tinkering on computers, but with EndeavourOS I feel like I’m less battling with my OS and more with my lack of skill/knowledge, which is much more rewarding to surmount, and makes me feel like my system is truly mine.
First Operating System: Windows 98
First Linux Distribution: Ubuntu Trusty
Apple ][ e: pictures of me playing point-and-click story games.
Ubuntu 4.10 “warty”
Windows 95 and Macintosh LC, elementary school computer lab stuff. My grandpa had a Windows 3.1 IBM PS/2. Those were all pretty old and practically obsolete computers when I used those, 98SE was out and ME was right around the corner.
My very first Linux distribution experience was Mandrake Linux I believe version 9 or something like that. Didn’t last that long though, I revisited Linux later with Ubuntu 7.04 which is when I actually switched to Linux full time.
ArchLinux since 2011. Still running that install to this day!
I cant help but feel this is some sort of password reset question farming…
Anyway,
ZX BASIC SUSE Linux 6.1
That would be a very targeted question! Like who would have that as a password reset question? Oh wait, the kind of people who run servers for a living! Damn, that’s clever 😅
First OS was DOS. Then Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, then Debian when this happened.
Hahahah what a story
I started with Commodore KERNAL/BASIC 2.0 on the VIC-20, if that counts as an operating system. Otherwise GeOS on the Commodore 64.
First Linux distro was slackware 3.0.
my first os was windows 95, but my first linux distro must’ve been whatever version of ubuntu was current around 2007/2008.
C16. Ugh I’m old.
VIC=20, Commodore 64, Vendex HeadStart, Zenith (forget the model), Tandy TL/2, then I had a 386SX/20 built, then I started building my own starting with a 486-DX4/100.
First dabbled with Linux when I bought a CD from Staples with “Linux95” on it. It was just Slackware. Then Red Hat 4.0 and Corel Linux.
For operating systems in general, my first computer ran Windows 95.
For my first Linux distro, that’d be Debian 12 Bookworm.
