It was the start of the second semester of my Freshman year at UIUC. After using the student unix machines for half a semester and getting a basic understanding of this unix thing thanks to playing and some friends on IRC, I wanted to learn more, so I figured putting it on my own machine was the way to go. (Also, too many of my dormmates kept taking over my computer to play Dune II, so it was side benefit.)
I had a 486DX 66MHz with 4 MB of RAM and a 120MB drive, and borrowed about 20 floppies from a warez friend of mine to copy slackware down to. I can't remember which version, but I do remember a .98pl kernel. Luckily, we had a net connected computer lab in our dorm, so downloading the floppies was fairly quick and painless. Well, as painless as loading up 20 floppies is. Seemed painless then, now I'd hang myself. A friend who had already been running linux for awhile helped me with some n00b questions like "What the hell does this partition stuff mean?" After a few months and getting my feet under me, I quickly upgraded to 8 MB RAM so I could run X without swapping when the mouse moved.
As others have stated in my thread, my career and computing life would have been radically different without the deeper understanding of how computers work, how to debug, how to read logs, etc that Linux helped me develop. Of course, there was a price to this knowledge, I did not get laid nearly enough at college. :)
Now I have a quad core 2.4Ghz machine with 4 GB of RAM and a 1TB harddrive. Now get off my lawn!
