A walnut creek CDROM? Well look at the mr. millionaire here, I could not afford a CD drive at the time :) My first slackware install took like 5 hours of flipping floppies (40 or so) and haphazardly answering questions like "Do you want to install Python? Ruby? Guile? I don't know, do I?!?". I messed something up and the root password was not set properly. All I could do was spend another 5 hours reinstalling it and hope this time it would go right, so I did. I think on the same day I first ran vi, couldn't figure out how to type anything, or exit for that matter, so I ctrl-alt-deleted the computer :) I had just 4 megs of ram too, basically all the computer could do is boot to a shell so I could enable swap. Starting X swapped the hell out of it. Good times.
I honestly don't know if in this day and age I would take up Linux. Back then I did because I was bored, hungry for knowledge and was soaking in anything computer-related I could get my hands on. Linux provided so many new technologies to tinker with. With the cornucopia of freely and easily accessible knowledge that we have today... I don't know, maybe I would choose a different path altogether.
I honestly don't know if in this day and age I would take up Linux. Back then I did because I was bored, hungry for knowledge and was soaking in anything computer-related I could get my hands on. Linux provided so many new technologies to tinker with. With the cornucopia of freely and easily accessible knowledge that we have today... I don't know, maybe I would choose a different path altogether.