On 8/29/19, William Pechter <pechter(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 8/28/2019 6:48 PM, Adam Thornton wrote:
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Although the period I am thinking of was way pre-slackware. You had a
boot floppy and a root floppy and that was about it, I think. I think
the kernel had MFM/RLL disk drivers for an ISA bus interface? I
remember that I could boot the thing on the MCA machines in the lab
but not actually install it (even had I been allowed to), and I think
installation was pretty much fdisk/mkfs, extract the tarball...I don't
remember how you installed the bootloader...which I guess was already
LILO at that point? Probably just dding the bootsector to the first
physical sector of the disk? Version 0.08 or so, maybe?
Sounds like SLS -- Soft Landing System -- which later was pretty much
replaced with Slackware. I used the early MCA stuff on PS/2's at IBM
for a while. Most of the PS/2 stuff we had was SCSI. The boot loader
was lilo. It could go in the partition space or disk mbr.
See:https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-bootload/index.html
FWLIW, you can get a copy of my installation of SLS at
https://sourceforge.net/projects/bochs/files/Disk%20Images/SLS%20Linux/
I included the floppy images so any time you can reinstall it or just
work on acquiring the joys of diskswapping as we knew it back then.
(It's one way to go crazy when you're tired, and get the fdisk/mkfs
stage wrong, or pick up the wrong disk or ... :)
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