Oh - a noobie! ;-) You can’t call yourself a Linux geek unless the first floppies you downloaded where SLS! ;-)
I saw Linus announce the kernel on comp.os.minix, and observed the flame war between Andrew Tannenbaum and Linus. I downloaded version 0.12 onto a 386 box which already had a minix file system (required if you wanted to play with the early kernels.) You had to use a binary editor to change the default boot disk. Once it booted, you found yourself with a bash prompt and not a whole lot more. It was interesting in that it already had the Virtual consoles of System V, and could do job control just like BSD -both in one box! Then I spent alot of time downloading all of the different GNU tools and compiling stuff to build-out a Unix box.
My biggest challenge was to get “rogue” on it. I got hold of the Rogue sources that were running around on the net and tried to compile it. Well - it used the BSD version of Terminal I/O while the first version of Linux had the System V model (Posix I think). So I spent some time changing the rogue code to use the other terminal model.
I found that there was one bug in the serial console driver code when it was talking to a VT-100 - and added one line to the kernel which fixed the problem. That is my entire contribution to the kernel to this day!
Once I got Rogue working I published the new version. I got requests about that for 15 years after the fact! This after it had been completely redone by none other than Alan Cox who was for a time the #2 guy in the linux world.
So what did the first Linux kernel have that was so amazing? Well - beyond job control and virtual consoles - it had a 64Mbyte process space, and room for 64000 processes. That sounds puny by today’s standards -but you have to compare that against 64Kbytes for Minix, or maybe 16Mb for a virtual 80286! It just blew me away! And WOW - it was FAST! Just ran circles around DOS. It was also limited. It had to be run on a 386. It had to have the standard disk drives (no SCSI for instance)
When they finally ported X windows, you had to have one of a maybe a dozen video cards to run X - and it ran TWM (barf!) But a little 386 with 4Mb of memory was really peppy!
I miss those days!
/johnny