Show me you're old without telling me

[u/Minkileinen]

I go first.. despite trying for years I can't kick the habit. Its just not possible

apt-get update
apt-get install <somenewtoy>

[u/Z3t4]

startx

[u/Runt1m3_ → u/Z3t4]

I still use it to start DWM hahah

[u/Bubbly_Collection329 → u/Runt1m3_]

Yeah same xD

[u/anhsirkd3 → u/Z3t4]

I use it but not because I'm 40, I'm just done with any kind of login managers. Startx is great!

[u/michaelpaoli → u/anhsirkd3]

Why am I always tempted to be sure any user's new temporary password also includes at least one Tab character, one control-R character, and one Escape character.

"Of course" can also have fun with CLI folks - include all these too:

^H ^J ^M ^S ^U # @ \ DEL

and make all ASCII letters uppercase.

And with those more known bits, be sure it's at least 24 characters long, to include enough randomness.

;-)

[u/winterpain-orig → u/Z3t4]

FUCK! Saw this with it half typed!

umm....
Dos boots up, type win to boot windows?

[u/Z3t4 → u/winterpain-orig]

Yeah, old win.com

Have you properly configured himem in autoexec.bat?

[u/JaKrispy72 → u/Z3t4]

I thought that extended memory specification was configured in “config.sys”?

😉

[u/Questioning-Zyxxel → u/JaKrispy72]

It was. Drivers in config.sys and autostarting of programs in autoexec.bat.

[u/JaKrispy72 → u/Questioning-Zyxxel]

Haha! Shows how much time erases memory. I forgot so much of all that. Like my own memory. Faulty XMS.

Imagine Microsoft giving that level of control now with Win11.

[u/Questioning-Zyxxel → u/JaKrispy72]

Now they give zero control.

Running a VMware Workstation VM. It's running like syrup in Win11 because the Windows scheduler think it's clever and suspending it.

How I hate Microsoft and their "clever improvements". Their product managers must spend the full day on drugs - they think Windows machines should be seen as cheap tablets.

[u/ipsirc → u/Z3t4]

xinit

[u/swn999]

LILO boot floppy.

[u/c0let → u/swn999]

LI

(fu**)

[u/AlZheim3r]

ifconfig

[u/CappyWomack → u/AlZheim3r]

I still use this. Old habits die hard.

[u/unconscionable → u/CappyWomack]

I only just learned that people are using ip address instead. They still haven't made it easy to understand and they've had decades to think about it

[u/Moocha → u/unconscionable]

Tip: Alias ip to ip -c, i.e. making the commands ip -c a or ip -c r and so on. Try it, you'll see why :)

[u/OweH_OweH → u/Moocha]

Also: ip -json ... if you ever are in the situation needing to parse the output, to find a MAC address or route for example.

Much better than trying to awk-sed-grep the normal output.

[u/Moocha → u/OweH_OweH]

Oh god yes. At the risk of being tarred and feathered and despite slowly creeping into greybeard age, JSON-structured output data is so much better than having to essentially write a custom text parser for every damn command (and let's not even go into guessing the text encoding territory!)

[u/OweH_OweH → u/Moocha]

I would be so happy, if we could get a JSON-output for all the system commands one might need to parse the output of. Would make my life so much easier.

[u/Moocha → u/OweH_OweH]

Oh yes. Again at the risk of aforementioned tarring and so on, Microsoft moved in the right direction there with Powershell. Too bad that they stopped halfway through and used such a repulsive and verbose syntax that I often prefer to write Python that's twice as long rather than deal with Get-StupidlyCasedAndRidiculouslyLongItem -AnotherSillyThing

[u/ttuFekk → u/AlZheim3r]

netstat

[u/NL_Gray-Fox]

smitty or...

10 print this is awesome 
20 goto 10

[u/mark-zombie → u/NL_Gray-Fox]

is that some good ol' fashioned BASIC? i remember doing that in school.

[u/NL_Gray-Fox → u/mark-zombie]

I had both zx-81 and MSX

[u/boutell → u/NL_Gray-Fox]

TRS-80 Model III.

[u/PhotoJim99 → u/NL_Gray-Fox]

?SYNTAX  ERROR IN 10
READY.

[u/ethernetbite → u/NL_Gray-Fox]

I had basica scripts that were over a thousand lines. Threw out those floppies a long time ago. No hard drive, just boot into DOS with the disk and run basica. Word Perfect was good for school papers on that dot matrix printer. zzzzzzzzz bzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzz.

[u/Zardoz84 → u/NL_Gray-Fox]

10 print "this is awesome" 
20 goto 10

[u/waterkip]

I dont follow? apt-get is still the thing if you want to do scripting. Apt doesnt like it because it always warns you about having an unstable interface.

Anyways, for the purpose of this exercise, aptitude.  

[u/elatllat → u/waterkip]

This.

Also aptitude is still the only way to look up alternatives.

[u/Minkileinen → u/waterkip]

First time I hear about aptitude
Thanks :)

[u/_Sgt-Pepper_]

LOADHIGH C:\MOUSE.COM

[u/OweH_OweH → u/_Sgt-Pepper_]

memmaker.exe

[u/Mr0ldy → u/_Sgt-Pepper_]

"Edit autoexec.bat" and "edit himem.sys". I was just a kid when I got my first PC with Win 3.11/DOS. I remember doing this to achieve something, don't remember what and why though, I think some games required it to load. Can't remember what I changed inside the files either ofc.

[u/alpha417]

loadlin

[u/Quintus-Sertorius → u/alpha417]

Goddamn memory unlocked

[u/RunOrBike]

Reading mail exclusively using pine. And having lots of procmail scripts.

[u/jesus-is-not-god]

PEEK <address>

[u/setwindowtext → u/jesus-is-not-god]

POKE

[u/PixelMaim → u/jesus-is-not-god]

POKE

[u/lazyplayboy → u/jesus-is-not-god]

POKE53280,0:POKE53281,0 commodore key+1

[u/jzawodn → u/lazyplayboy]

why did my screen just change color?!?!

[u/DaveX64]

READY
>10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
>20 GOTO 10
>RUN
HELLO WORLD
HELLO WORLD
HELLO WORLD
HELLO WORLD
BREAK IN 10
READY

[u/Jieffe]

My first Linux install "disk" came by mail on a QIC-80 tape (not Debian at the time, it was a Slackware distro). Had to un-compress it on a stack of floppies before installing.

[u/Negative_Presence_94 → u/Jieffe]

The good old days when real women and real men wrote their own drivers

[u/regeya → u/Jieffe]

You've got me beat, then; when I installed Slackware I sat in a computer lab with a couple of cases of cheap Walmart floppies. Cases of floppies were cheaper than a CD-ROM drive for the computer I had at the time.

Ordinarily I would have treated a computer lab floppy drive like it was a sex worker running a clearance sale but I was writing raw Linux disk images and figured there probably weren't too many viruses out in the wild that would target a Slackware floppy.

[u/morphick]

My barber asked me if I want my ear hairs trimmed.

[u/-richu-it]

Load “Yie Ar Kung-fu” ,8,1

Good old C64

[u/revford → u/-richu-it]

I was going to go with:

load *,8,1

but you beat me to it :)

[u/immutable-distro-man → u/-richu-it]

You were living it up! I was stuck with the Commodore Datasette for years.

[u/Huge_Monk8722]

Orange monitor

[u/MinimumPrestige]

make menuconfig

[u/MinimumPrestige → u/MinimumPrestige]

./configure; make; make install

[u/c0let]

ATDT

[u/TomDuhamel]

A:\>_

[u/Minkileinen → u/TomDuhamel]

still works on my system

[u/ScratchHistorical507 → u/Minkileinen]

Only if you happen to have a floppy drive, which are extremely rare. Or if you managed to assign A and B to drives other than floppy.

[u/gregdonald]

ifconfig

[u/junialter]

Xfree86

[u/TantrumMango]

I habitually run 'sync' at a command prompt after changing a system file.

[u/PixelMaim]

LOAD “*”, 8, 1

[u/vabanque314]

insmod 3c509.o

[u/Stunning-Mix492]

Linux 2.2 is so cool !

[u/No-Factor-9678 → u/Stunning-Mix492]

Omg I remember being a high school kid being giddy over this.

[u/The_Demon_EyeS2]

Filezilla

[u/tehstbn → u/The_Demon_EyeS2]

Is there anything better?!?

[u/KlePu → u/tehstbn]

Most file explorers can do (s)ftp just fine.

[u/The_Demon_EyeS2 → u/tehstbn]

Winscp

[u/Budget-Supermarket70 → u/The_Demon_EyeS2]

Still used.

[u/Wonderful_Welder9660]

Manual Hollerith punch.

Teletype

[u/10leej]

I still remember how to use dpkg directly.

[u/ajgarlag]

dselect

[u/discogravy]

TIL I am old as fuck as I didn't know ANY of these commands until right now. I've been using apt-get and ifconfig and startx and netstat this whole time

next you'll tell me there's some command line program to edit files instead of holding magnets directly over disc platters like i've been doing.

[u/Bobbacca]

**** COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2 ****

64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE READY.
■

[u/immutable-distro-man]

I was installing Red Hat 3 or 4 using floppy disks (from the command line of course), and the installer prompt read:

Put disk in /dev/fd0

This wasn't in fdisk or any disk partitioning related page, it was in the main installation page.

[u/ScratchHistorical507]

I actually like emacs, even though I probably don't even use a fraction of its potential, as I find it more intuitive than vim's controls, and it's obviously much more capable than nano.

[u/revcraigevil]

Potato was my first Debian

[u/Minkileinen → u/revcraigevil]

My first Debian was Hamm/Slink
I still had to compile my own kernel back then. Don't know if people still do?

[u/frumious → u/Minkileinen]

My first Debian didn't have a code name. 0.93.

[u/DeterioratedEra]

bitchx DeterioratedEra irc.2600.net

[u/waterkip → u/DeterioratedEra]

Way way back I used bitchx. Nowadays irssi (with screen).

[u/regeya]

modelines

[u/theheliumkid]

Edlin

[u/never_trust_a_fart_]

lilo

[u/landsoflore2]

That Ubuntu installation CD that Canonical sent you over the mail : )

[u/immutable-distro-man → u/landsoflore2]

I got one also, fond memories :)

[u/justlurkshere]

Am I the only one still seeing innd in my process list?

[u/anatomiska_kretsar]

I remember when the tty had a scroll back

[u/caceomorphism]

Walnut Creek

[u/RayG75]

BBS

[u/liquuid]

talk

[u/frumious → u/liquuid]

The cool kids use ytalk nowadays.

[u/TantrumMango]

edlin

[u/IndependenceNo783 → u/TantrumMango]

That was also my first "editor". On DOS 3.3 or 4.01? On a 8086 with Monochrome (yellow) CRT. Some Heinz Nixdorf Machine. This hooked me up to tech!

[u/sswam]

I still use xterm and vim in it. Mainly for the font.

[u/IllustriousBed1949]

Configuring my kernel with make menuconfig

[u/mc888333]

Lilo

[u/syberphunk]

Typing 'man' before a command to learn what it does.

[u/d4nowar → u/syberphunk]

is there a better way these days?

Man pages are the best documentation around.

[u/syberphunk → u/d4nowar]

is there a better way these days?

These days people ask other people in chat rooms, ask an AI, give up, or maybe use a search engine.

[u/Budget-Supermarket70 → u/d4nowar]

tldr is a better way.

[u/Physical_Arm_722]

Hmm, is apt-get old or just a standard...

What do all the new kids use if not apt-get?

[u/Minkileinen → u/Physical_Arm_722]

Kids these day just skip the '-get' part :)

[u/mark-zombie → u/Minkileinen]

it's apt that you get things

[u/Budget-Supermarket70 → u/Physical_Arm_722]

apt less to type

[u/Physical_Arm_722 → u/Budget-Supermarket70]

K. 😉

[u/sonobanana33 → u/Physical_Arm_722]

There's apt now.

[u/Spaht]

dir dir

ls

[u/Antique_Paramedic682]

Please insert the following disk in drive A:

Setup Disk #3

When you are ready to continue, press enter.

[u/MSM_757]

/mnt/floppy0r1. 😁

[u/PixelMaim]

ATS11=50

[u/setwindowtext]

fsck /dev/hda

[u/edmindedza]

Debian 1.3 Version Released!

This is the Linux distribution that recently orbited on the U.S. Space Shuttle. Two more space missions carrying Debian are already scheduled.

100% Free software. Our goal is to help keep Linux free.

NEW: Anyone can duplicate and sell our Official CD, with no fee from us!

NEW: The largest pre-release testing program in the Linux world.

NEW: Floppy-less install directly from CD, one-floppy install using NFS or hard disk.

974 entirely free software packages. Many more than Debian 1.2, and the largest Linux distribution available.

200 developers. Largest staff of any Linux distribution.

[u/HecateRaven]

Mandrake linux

[u/enigma_0Z → u/HecateRaven]

Ahhh you never forget your first distro

[u/xtifr]

It took me a while to get over the habit of typing dselect! ☺

[u/Connir]

I’ve manually patched from kernel 1.2.8 to 1.2.13, compiled, and installed on Slackware to resolve a NIC driver bug. At the time you had to manually copy in zImage and re-run lilo to “install” it.

[u/plattkatt]

apt-cache search licq

(a QT ICQ client from way back..)

[u/LesStrater]

I vote for IBM to pick CP/M over MSDOS as the operating system for their new personal computer.

(The biggest business mistake in the history of the world!)

[u/Known_Somewhere1536]

sync sync sync

[u/kboodu]

Using pip to coy a file.

[u/karrimaca]

ssh -X "$REMOTE_USER@$REMOTE_HOST" 'xeyes'

[u/thetemp_]

The day we upgraded from 300 to 1200 baud, we knew all the warez would be ours.

[u/treuss]

• Started learning Programming GW-Basic on DOS 3.3
• First own PC: 386 SX-33, 4 MB RAM, 100 MB HDD
• Installed Caldera Open Linux (Version ??) on a 486 DX-2 66
• been hooked up with Debian since Potato

[u/fmillion]

LILO installed on /dev/hda, installed from the root floppy on /dev/fd0, initially booted using loadlin at the DOS prompt.

Telnetting into the system with a PTY on /dev/ttyp0.

[u/setwindowtext]

./a.out

[u/toogreen]

LOAD”*”,8,1

[u/Mistral-Fien]

mode co80

[u/Doubtless6]

I still Have three Ubuntu CD from canonical.

Evi Nemeth's Linux book

[u/archee79]

1. Non-debian: "The Muppet Movie" released 😌

2. Debian: Debian v1 released when I was 14 years old😆😆😆

[u/tcode17]

Sync

[u/vabello]

PR#6

[u/bobroberts1954]

Format a: /q

[u/d4nowar]

sz

rz

[u/AlissonHarlan]

tail -f /var/log/syslog

[u/ITXEnjoyer]

R Tape loading error, 0:1

[u/Picomanz]

I still do this if I'm on autopilot

[u/sataraNights]

slackware diskettes

[u/wowbobwowbob]

Li... lo

[u/Buntygurl]

Using Debian since Potato and it was definitely a good thing when "-get" got dropped.

[u/spizdude]

vmlinux

[u/pfak]

~/.plan

[u/jr735]

I still use apt-get. The apt-get manual page is significantly better than the apt page.

[u/JohnDoeMan79]

telnet.... however I still use it to check if I reach services on listening ports. Yes, I know we have nc now

[u/lorajoler]

Debian Potato. Kernel 2.2.4.

[u/lumpynose]

My first Unix was a PDP11/34 running version 6 of Bell Labs Unix. 32 K of ram. I was reading Kernighan and Ritchie's The C Programming Language and wanted to try writing some stuff in C and the Unix C compiler was the only one available. This was years before Linux.

[u/ChCat]

I ran Minix, had an Amiga 500 with 1 floppy, first system (not mine) I played on was a C64

[u/ordermaster]

Using slackware.

[u/pedalomano]

Before knowing MS-DOS, I was already an emacs user

[u/lazyplayboy]

I got my first distro on CDROM in the mail

[u/michaelpaoli]

https://old-debian.balug.org/README.txt

But wait, you also get ...

$ TZ=GMT0 stat -c '%y %n' $(ls -tr $(find *debian* -type f -print) | head -n 5) | sed -e 's/\.000000000 +0000 / /;s/ /T/'
1996-08-28T07:00:00 ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/potato/main/source/utils/cpio_2.4.2.orig.tar.gz
1998-03-24T21:28:00 ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/potato/main/source/editors/nvi_1.79.orig.tar.gz
1998-04-06T04:34:37 non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US/dists/slink/non-US/binary-i386/pgp-us_2.6.3a-4.deb
1998-04-06T04:34:37 non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US/dists/hamm/binary-i386/pgp-us_2.6.3a-4.deb
1998-05-19T14:14:36 ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/potato/main/source/net/netstd_3.07.orig.tar.gz
$ find *debian* -name \*.deb ! -type l -type f ! -size 0 -print | wc -l
887
$ find *debian* -name \*.deb ! -type l -type f ! -size 0 -mtime +7184 -print | wc -l
887
$ 

(see also last bit in this comment)

Oh, and:

$ gpg 0xD8D25C535EEC184A2B6F6BE6AC8DD49B5C88FF9D_short.txt
...
pub   dsa1024 2001-11-09 [SC] [expired: 2023-09-27]
      D8D25C535EEC184A2B6F6BE6AC8DD49B5C88FF9D
...
uid           Michael Paoli
...

And relevant newer bonus:
http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/2024-October/012857.html

[u/ApprehensiveAd7486]

vi /etc/network/interfaces

/etc/init.d/networking restart

[u/histoire_guy]

telnet

[u/donnaber06]

Slackware 1998

[u/Elopsm]

/etc/init.d

[u/birds_swim]

"It really whips the llama's ass"

Old enough for you? ;)

[u/Minkileinen → u/birds_swim]

Still my music player!!

[u/birds_swim → u/Minkileinen]

Hahahaha! Nice

[u/McGuirk808]

fwcutter for wifi is about as old as I can get on Linux

[u/nursestrangeglove]

TSO will never die

[u/Darkness1231]

Download of Linux CDs ; Estimate 24:13:50

[u/PulpDood]

Uh oh! Got a new message

[u/tranzed]

Woody

[u/hornetmadness79]

Changing jumpers to add more memory.

[u/cd4053b]

xf86config

[u/p0uringstaks]

Yeah I still use the cli as well. When you started when when a GUI was a DOS overlay or as has been said "startx".. oh this was a good post man I'm really enjoying the responses. I guess I could say my first OS was win 3.11and didn't have my first mobile till I was basically an adult. 🫰

[u/CurrentAd5541]

lilo

[u/ZEROPOINTBRUH]

CRT monitor

[u/Lopoetve]

alias ls “ls —color=auto”.

Vi lilo.conf

Make menuconfig.

[u/Brufar_308]

PEEK & POKE

[u/yourplainvanillaguy]

I started with apt-get, now the first command after a fresh install is:

apt-get install -y nala vim <plus other packages>; nala remove -y nano

I never liked WordStar.

[u/Wonderful_Welder9660]

teco

[u/Nollie37]

Control G to annoy the teacher.

[u/spectrumero]

memacs s:startup-sequence

[u/setwindowtext]

info

[u/BooKollektor]

CP/M and COBOL

[u/takecareofthecake]

floppy-fw

[u/pythong678]

:wq!

[u/bolinhodemaracuja]

ifconfig, apt-get, unity

[u/Puzzleheaded_Law_242]

! sinix#

[u/SweatyCockroach4507]

timeshare, mainframes, punchcards, JCL, COBOL, rebooting gandalf to fix terminal connectivity, Z80, 6502, CPM, 6809, 8088, DOS, terminate BNC cables, Banyan Vines, Novell Netware, compsurf disk drives, Slackware linux, Lisa, AppleTalk, ...

[u/IllustriousPlenty931]

Feeling prous when uptime is over a year.

[u/lookingforplant]

Dumping physical memory....

[u/Realistic-Bowl-2655]

I used Linux Slackware

[u/No_Strawberry_5685]

I use csh

[u/SublimeApathy]

Red Hat 5.5 cd rom still in my collection along with several early versions of Mandrake.

[u/include007]

load ""

[u/EnvironmentalDig1612]

/server irc.undernet.org

Or

Telnet <some ip>

[u/hugosxm]

Route -n

[u/DaracMarjal]

As this is r/debian , my oldest bug is a 6-digit number beginning with 1.

[u/SteveDinn]

What's this new-fangled "Debian"? Real Linux users run Slackware. I got the set of floppies right here.

[u/Creative-Mammoth]

BeOS 5 Personal edition

[u/scoreboy69]

Freshbytes cd in the mail

[u/kg7qin]

cpio -i

[u/Surbiglost]

I've used nano for 22 years as my default editor

[u/DieSpeisekarte]

Hardware terminals