Post 001 of #100DaysToOffload

The first computer I remember having regular access to was a Tandy 1000HX. It was well beyond its prime when I got my hands on it and the details of how I acquired it are very fuzzy. I believe it came from a flea market or a yard sale or something of that nature. I just remember its weight on the dining room table.

I had seen other computers at school and out in the public but this is the first one I remember having the ability do whatever I wanted with it. I don’t remember the beast having a hard drive. It was equipped with a couple of floppy drives. These things shipped with DOS and I’m almost certain DOS was present but the one very vivid memory I have of it is that it came with MINIX floppy disks.

I have no way of verifying this. I’ve searched and found posts from people who had MINIX running on similar computers but nothing conclusive. I suppose it’s possible that I have mixed up the 1000HX with other computer memories later in life but I very distinctly remember the word MINIX and the aforementioned dining room table.

I did nothing useful with this computer. I typed a lot and it beeped a lot. I did at one point or another manage to open and read some files that were incomprehensible to me. At some point I got tired of typing on it and I simply disassembled it as I was prone to do with most electronic things within my reach as a pre-teen. Pretty stereotypical, I suppose.

A couple of years went by and I had continued exposure to various computers at school and in the world. Mostly things like the Apple ][e and some 386 machines. I lived in a semi-rural area so the technology we had was typically 5-10 years behind the rest of the world (as an aside, this is how I was successful with having fun on the telephone systems but that’s another story). Somewhere around 1995 or 1996 I saw a 486 at a garage sale and bought it with money I had saved up from various odd jobs.

It had a hard disc, a floppy drive, and a very slow CD-ROM drive. It didn’t boot as there wasn’t an OS on the drive. I wasn’t sure what to do with it at that point and left it alone for a while. On a trip to a larger city, I had visited a bookstore and saw a magazine that featured Linux. “Linux” sounded a lot like “MINIX” to me so I started thumbing through the issue.

I didn’t understand most of what I was reading but there were a couple of terminal prompts listed that reminded me of what I saw on the Tandy. As I got further in the magazine I saw an ad for Walnut Creek CDROM. My memory is hazy here but I either wrote down the phone number or stole the page out of the magazine because I certainly could not afford to buy it.

They had a 12 CD collection with 11 different versions of Linux and one FreeBSD CD. I talked my parents into ordering a set for me and I think they were totally baffled but figured it was better than the crap I wanted to order out of the heavy metal magazines I read (sadly the music magazines and not the art publication).

When the discs arrived, I was only able to get RedHat and FreeBSD running. I forget the versions but this was probably 1996 so it would’ve likely been 5.2 and 2.2 respectively. I found the RedHat CD to have more available software so I stuck with that. I dove into everything I could: man pages, software packages, hell I even picked up Perl.

From that day on, I was daily driving Linux (and occasionally FreeBSD). The story from here is long and winding as there’s 30 years of history to unpack. Perhaps I’ll continue the series later.