Thank you for all the welcomes.
It was way back in 1998 or 1999, a person in my vocational electronics class, during my last High School year, brought in a Slackware CD. He told us that Linux just keep growing, and I thought to myself, "won't it run out of Disk space?" Honestly I thought the guy was crazy. Microsoft ruled the PC, mostly because they had all the drivers for PCs. How was that going to work with Linux?
He didn't know what He was doing. He popped the disc into a machine and just started poking around. Eventually he realized there was windows program on it that would create a floppy boot disk. So we booted into a command line without having any idea what commands existed. He only knew ls was like dir for dos. Eventually he gave me the floppy to take home. I messed around with it, and tried to see if I could get it to install something. I managed to mess up the partitioning on the hard drive, and apparently the mbr too. Even when I used dos to fdisk it back to the way the partition is supposed to work for dos. After trying to install the system files for dos, it wouldn't boot again. Finally I went into the bios, and that bios allowed me to do a low level format. I did that, and later learned that your not supposed to do that on an IDE drive. Anyways that got things back to the way it was supposed to be. After that I could fdisk it and reformat, install Dos and was back to the way things were. For years I never messed with Linux again.
Like I said the guy was crazy. He popped open a cd rom that wasn't working correctly. He thought maybe he could clean the laser lens and get it to read again. That didn't work, so He hooked it up to a power supply, and cranked the voltage up. The next thing I knew he was using it to launch the Slackware disc like a supper charged Frisbee. After the disc got all scratched up He put in another CD rom and was shocked that it was still readable.
He was always after me to upgrade my old 386 computer. I kept telling him, I don't want to mess with it, the machine works. Plus I used it for writing all my papers on it. That made him mad at me and wouldn't talk to me for years. Sometime years in time, I found him online. We started talking again. And once again He tried to get me into Linux. To make a long story short, He left me a Ubuntu Disc and a used computer. I made a Windows/Ubuntu install. It ran but I didn't know how to connect Ubuntu to the internet. I was on dial up and my ISP sent me a windows installation CD that set up the networking stuff for me. So I didn't know what I was doing there. Eventually that computer became my Grandmas computer, and it wound up having Windows XP on it until she passed away in 2018.
Around 2007, I had to get off of my Dial up, it just wasn't fast enough anymore. I thought I would need to get rid of the internet completely. Someone on JCfaith, a faith based social networking site told me about a Verizon Wireless Air Card. So I went to a Verizon store and got on that for several years. Verizon changed their plan on me, without me knowing it. They began throttling my internet connection. Someone on Facebook who happened to work for Verizon, gave me their number to call. I called them and they told me what happened. In order for me to get my speed back I had to switch my plan from unlimited internet to limited internet. So I did that for a couple of years.
During that time period, another guy on Facebook, told me that I should give Linux a try. He brought me some Ubuntu Discs that He had made. I played around with them but couldn't get online. I did a lot of research but it sounded like it was really hard to get online when you were on that Verizon Wireless thing. I never figured it out.
Verizon also owned our phone lines, and they would never turn on DSL for us. Finally Frontier took over the phone lines and did turn on DSL. I wanted off the Verizon plan but couldn't get off of it unless I paid them a 100 dollars. Which I did! Then I signed up for Frontier. Finally, I tried Ubuntu again, and this time it connected to the internet automatically. And that is how my journey with Linux finally got started. The story continues.
