@djsumdog A very fine specimen!
And this one was the start of it all for me. Never had the original box though, I think it might have been an add-on CD to some book or magazine. It's really ancient, I think it still had kernel 1.x and even some stuff in a.out binary format. Like Abuse the game. A lot of GUI stuff was using Tcl/Tk.
I didn't get a full cd version of linux until much later, and on dial-up you weren't gonna download a CD of anything.
When people talk about how linux's ux sucks, they don't know how far it's come.
@sj_zero It only took 20 megabytes of disk space and you could actually do something with it, e.g. xmosaic. There was also a floppy image of QNX circulating around that time which fit a single floppy and still had a GUI, a TCP/IP stack and browser. This was impressive!
And now a compressed source code of Firefox alone can fill the CD almost entirely 🤪
@djsumdog Yup, completely useless from the practical perspective, but an interesting read from historic one. I've recently found a book on "AJAX" from back when it was the buzzword. Of course it's obsolete, but still an interesting read and provides some insight on how we got to the state we are in today with the Web.
Some tech books do age well though, like Knuth's books and most Tanenbaum's, the K&R C book and Pike's Practical Programming — these never get old.
It's interesting that the way we document and learn software today has changed so much it's really made these types of books practically obsolete. The tech section at most book stores is small to non-existent.