I managed to salvage old Sun4 hardware out of skips and from usenet. It was far better supported on BSD than most of the rather fragmented x86 bits of kit were back then. The hardware support situation in the early-late 90's was horrible for most operating systems, Windows and Linux included. It is much improved now.
I originally installed NetBSD off QIC tape that was mailed to me by a friend at a university which had a decent connection :) It was plugged in via a large SCSI cable that only worked if you bent it in half and put a cable tie around it (it's innards were shredded).
Memories.
Just to add: StackExchange is a horrible pit of elitism. I'd rather deal with Usenet SPAM than use it.
Usenet used to be ubiquitous, especially when most of us were using dialup ISPs. Now we're all on broadband and our ISPs (Comcast et al.) don't carry it. There's Google groups, sort of ...
Does anyone subscribe to a for-pay usenet provider that they like? Does it offer old school text-based client access?
I originally installed NetBSD off QIC tape that was mailed to me by a friend at a university which had a decent connection :) It was plugged in via a large SCSI cable that only worked if you bent it in half and put a cable tie around it (it's innards were shredded).
Memories.
Just to add: StackExchange is a horrible pit of elitism. I'd rather deal with Usenet SPAM than use it.