E16 was the hook that caught me and landed me, flopping and writhing, on the decks of Linux - I saw a black and white printout of someone’s desktop, and immediately set about figuring out how to get this unbelievable coolness working on my laptop. By the time I was done I was muttering modelines in my sleep, and had already committed my first patches to a kernel module.

I wonder how many other teenagers got catfished into becoming software devs and sysadmins by the siren song of rasterman.

▲

malux85 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Me too! Looking at my old windows 98 machine and then at slackware Linux with enlightenment lured me to Linux and began a lifelong journey!

▲

torh 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Same for me. Slackware (I guess 4.0) and E16 was my first proper Linux installation. Learned so much during that time.

	▲	oldge 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Same for me. He definitely contributed to my fondness and wonder of Linux back then.

▲

madaxe_again 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

SuSE 5.1 for me, as it was what I could easily get the CD-ROMs for, as bandwidth was just a single 64k ISDN at school.

▲

malux85 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah that was the reason for me too, in order to get the distro CD ROMS I had to mail $10 to some random address and wait 4 weeks for them to be mailed back!

	▲	madaxe_again 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I tell people you used to have to post a cheque when you bought stuff online and they just look at me like I’m nuts. It was basically just mail order, but on the web.

▲

pjc50 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Modelines are one of those skills that I thought would get obsoleted, but in fact taught me the mechanics of video timing that I was able to use in unrelated contexts. Such as years later where I was asked to fix a driver for a point of sale system which had a 1024x200 (or thereabouts, extremely wide nonstandard ratio) secondary screen.