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)
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.
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.
You’ve got me beat. I’ve only seen 8" disks in coworkers “check out this shit” collection.
MS-DOS 5.0
apple2c, commadore64
Commodore 64 here, too.
First Linux distro was Ubuntu.
samesies
First OS was DOS. Then Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, then Debian when this happened.
Hahahah what a story
- 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
Windows Vista 👶
Apple ][ e: pictures of me playing point-and-click story games.
Ubuntu 4.10 “warty”
Texas Instruments ROM Basic, then later PC-DOS (not MSDOS)
my first os was windows 95, but my first linux distro must’ve been whatever version of ubuntu was current around 2007/2008.
First OS was MS-DOS on a Tandy. First Linux distro was Knoppix.
Woah, thanks for that bit of history! As someone who went from DOS to Win 3.1 outside of the US, I didn’t even know that was a thing!
First OS: Windows 3.1 running on top of MS-DOS 6.2
First Linux distro: Ubuntu (forgot the version, but it was circa 2018).
If I’d count an OS/Linux distro that I’ve used even if not in a machine I own, it’d be Linux Mint of circa 2006.
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!
DOS. Not sure what version, I was far too young to care. But not so young I couldn’t learn how to operate a command line interface!