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Joe Brockmeier (@jzb)

@BrideOfLinux Curious - did you seek out a Linux box set or was it an opportunistic "oh, let's see what this is about" thing?

I had never heard of Linux at all when I bought my first Linux CDs (Slackware 96). Just pure luck that I stumbled on a set in the cheap CD-ROM section of a store. $deity only knows how my life would've turned out if I'd missed it or decided against buying it.

@jzb I had been purposefully reading about Linux and open source for several years. Although there were cheap CD sets of many distros available online, at the time I'd never ordered online and wasn't about to trust my credit card number to the Web. I discovered by accident while visiting Best Buy that they had the PowerPak edition of Mandrake, and a boxed sets of Red Hat Linux. - both for about $70. I went home, did some research, and bought Mandrake the next day. I've been using Linux since.

@BrideOfLinux I was a bit more comfortable with online ordering - having worked for one of the companies selling cheap CDs online - but not overly so.

I do miss the box-set days. There's something nice about holding a manual and physical media in your hands. It's about as practical as vinyl records (probably less so, actually) but I still miss having something to hold. Then again, most of the time a box set is just something you have to get rid of in 10 years when things start piling up...

@jzb @BrideOfLinux I may hang on to things a bit long, but sometimes worth it. #slackware

@murph @jzb I still have the Linux For Dummies book that I bought at the same time as I bought the Mandrake set, which has a copy of Red Hat Linux 7 on 3 CDs in the cover.

@murph @BrideOfLinux I do still have my Slackware 96 set from 1996. I won't ever throw that away.

@jzb I still regret throwing out the Mandrake boxed set and the book that came with it, just as I regret getting rid of the install disk and really nice trade paperback for StarOffice that Sun sent me after I took their free Certified StarOffice Administrator or something course and test. I really liked StarOffice. Ran it for years.

@jzb I was initially attracted to open source because the '60s New Left hippie in me liked the idea of codifying the notion of sharing. I first became interested in Linux when I moved from Windows 3.11 to Windows 98 and started experiencing the infamous Blue Screen multiple times a day. People who knew a whole lot more about computers than I were saying that Linux was superior to anything Microsoft was capable of producing, and I was inclined to believe them.