Mastodawn

Do you remember your first FreeBSD install?
Many in our community remember when installing an operating system meant waiting on physical media, dial-up downloads, or carefully tested CD distributions, long before pulling source took seconds.

We’d like to hear your story:
• Was your first FreeBSD install from a CD?
• Do you remember your first release?

Share your experience in the comments.

🔗 Wayne Self’s original reflection: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wself_been-thinking-about-how-much-access-to-software-ugcPost-7431565320290619392-RHVM/

#FreeBSD #OpenSource #BSD #Community

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FRANK.MCCONNEL Feb 24

@FreeBSDFoundation Late 1996. 2.1.5-RELEASE. On a Dell 80486 with something like 32MB of RAM. Somewhere in those years of 2.x and ISA bus I sent in a fix for bounce buffers (anyone remember those?) which was accepted by Mike Smith.

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FRANK.MCCONNEL

@FreeBSDFoundation I am thinking that Dell had one of those old weird PC CD-ROM interfaces that was neither ATA nor SCSI and couldn't boot from CD-ROM. So I think I made a boot 3.5" floppy from a file on the CD-ROM and used that for the initial boot, then sysinstall copied most of the OS in from the CD-ROM.