The multi-colored 3.5" floppy disk pack gave the effort a sort of festive air, as if somehow the huge, colorful murals spread across either side of the dining area in my favorite tacqueria across town were witness to the process via small-but-inedible emissaries.
My only connection was over our (then, typical) single telephone landline using a program called SLIRP to turn an interactive dial-up shell session into a general purpose Internet connection. This was slow, of course, far too slow for doing a network-based install or even really for batch-downloading the image files needed to write to all those floppies. So, I downloaded the image files while I was on campus, wrote them to the floppies, and carted the multi-hued collection down the hill to my apartment.
At work, the systems included embedded instrument-control systems with vendor-supplied software running on bare metal with no underlying operating system (OS). Beyond that, a mix of beige Macs, mostly PowerPC but maybe also a few m68K stragglers served for routine word processing and data analysis and presentation. One of the larger, more specialized instruments ran 0S-9 (think Microware, not Macintosh). I don't remember there being much Windows or even MS-DOS in that lab.
We had one instrument control and data acquisition system built atop an IBM-PC running OS/2 that would feature into my first practical use of Linux (a story to tell elsewhere). And, back in a repurposed nook in someone else's lab space that had been turned into a de-facto computer room, were two SGI systems running IRIX, one belonging to the host lab, an Indigo, I think. And then there was ours, a newer but more modest for its time than what the Indigo had been in its day, box, an Indy.
So, this was why I had bought a replacement hard drive for the IBM at home. I was spending a lot of time in front of that Indy, and wanted to be able to run some of the things on a more flexible schedule. It might seem strange, now, in the days when home Internet connections are relatively fast and widespread; strange in a time when working from home has been a pandemic mandate rather than a lab rat's unusual obsession. But it was why I was trying to gather the fiesta of disk sets. I needed to feed them to the IBM if I was going to be able to install and run Slackware, the first of many permanent Linux installations I would be able to run for extended, indefinite periods.
(Image by frankileon on flickr used under CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia)
