On Fri 27 Sep 2019 at 07:04:28 (-0400), Dan Ritter wrote: > David Wright wrote: > > On Wed 25 Sep 2019 at 18:12:25 (+0200), Sebastian Hyrwall wrote: > > > On 2019-09-25 14:36, Dan Ritter wrote: > > > > It turns out that Debian is relatively old. I've been using it > > > > since 1996 or so, and it was in version 2.1 back then. (I > > > > haven't bothered to check this.) > > > > 1996 takes you back to buzz, the first release, and its successor, rex. > > Then it was almost certainly 1997 or even 1998;
Yes, and late 1998 at that: hamm/2.0 wasn't released until 1998-07-24, so slink/2.1 wouldn't even appear as "testing" until then AFAICT. But I was assuming, perhaps wrongly, that people recall what happened in their lives, and in which year, better than they remember the Debian release numbers of twenty years ago. So recalling 1996, when I started running Debian, both buzz/1.1 and rex/1.2 were released; releases came thick and fast back then! > I remember > trying out Debian because of the new (at the time) promise that > a major version could be upgraded to a new major version without > wiping the filesystem and starting over again. I had been > repeatedly bitten on that point by Slackware and Red Hat. Yes, I started using linux by running Slackware on a 486DX using the UMSDOS filesystem, which occupied C:\LINUX on a DOS 6.22 FAT16 system. Having a background of IBM MVS, DEC-20, VMS and DOS, I used it solely to learn about the unix world, armed with the rearing horse, the cowboy, and X volume 8, and never tried to upgrade it. As soon as I got hold of my first Pentium, with a 2GB disk, I switched to dual booting DOS/Windows and Debian's buzz. Debian was so much more organised. Funnily enough, though, I got stuck on my first upgrade, buzz→rex, because the rex kernels supported fewer scsi partitions (in the days of static device numbers), which made my root filesystem inaccessible. As my Jaz drive could hold 1GB, I just backed up all my own stuff and repartitioned the disk. Fine after that. Cheers, David.
