My experiments with Slackware beta from May 1993

This is the earliest version of Slackware known to exist, the kernel build date is about a month before the Slackware 1.0 release. I've got disk images for 1.01, but never found a 1.0. The disk set on the Slackware mirrors doesn't have any X disks, but I used SLS disks to get XFree86 1.2.

I uploaded a corrected disk set on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/slackware-beta

There was no support for the Cirrus Logic chipset that QEMU emulates in XFree86 1.2, so it is limited to 1-bit monochrome with a 800x650 resolution. Even though the QEMU card can present at least 2MB of VRAM, this X server will only use 64KB. With a supported card like the Tseng ET4000 it would have full SVGA color and resolution. A little later an unsupported card could use 16 colors and I think 256K of VRAM.

The default is twm, but it also has Open Look.

Would it really be Slackware without fortune in the .bashrc? It didn't ship with fortune yet.

Open Look's text editor.

The file manager xfm doesn't do much, but it works.

It can go online.

Unfortunately redditbox.us no longer exists, but this was just using a telnet client. https://github.com/ajarmoszuk/redditbox

I got Lynx 2.1 from late 1993 to build without too much trouble, it is the earliest version I could find.

I use theoldnet.com because the creator was very helpful and made it HTTP/1.0 compatible. These old browsers don't handle redirects required by modern virtual servers.

Lynx does gophers pretty well.

I found a working binary for Mosaic 1.2. It can poorly display some parts of the NCSA site, this is the default homepage URL and it is just displaying a 'Not Found' page.

I tried to go to theoldnet.com, but it just crashes. The site works fine with later versions of Mosaic. I don't think anything http I've tried actually loads, I only got it to load some local stuff.

It poorly does gophers.

Found an early version of xgopher. Works OK, but I think Lynx is better.

Built an early version of ircII, this is from 1994 since I couldn't find a good 1993 one.

The clock in the ircII status bar is stuck at 11:59PM, I suspect this is something to do with the Y2K problem. As you can see it thinks it is 1919. If I add \t to the $PS1, it is also stuck at 23:59:59 even though the date command and oclock say otherwise.

Bit funny that #linux happens to be talking about someone using Debian 6 and it being ancient.

I can 'fix' it by setting an arbitrary pre-2000 date and time with -rtc on QEMU. Luckily it really doesn't matter what the time is set to, the clock stops when I pause QEMU anyway so it is never right anyway.

Spider solitaire has a pretty nice touch of inverting the color of the cards when in monochrome mode.

XLander doesn't have color anyway, so it works exactly the same.

Built xmines too.

Looks like xtetris wants color to work?

Still have the terminal version though.

I got xtetris working after building it from source. The original install was a binary that was on the SLS X disks, I didn't do anything special in the build, but it works now.

Looking back at this, I think I just needed to set monochrome X resources. I noticed there are two app-defaults when I was trying to later get color working. Even though I had X with color this was still monochrome.

I've tried getting Samba working so I can easily transfer files in and out. It builds fine, but doesn't seem to like the SMB server that QEMU presents. I don't have any issues with Samba 1.6.07 on a slightly later distro, but that is too new to build on this kernel.

It seems to be doing something, when I use the right IP (10.0.2.4) it gives a different error than not seeing a server.

I should have thought of this sooner, just a simple http server. I pointed it to a directory of a mounted ISO. This is an old X11R5 disc from Walnut Creek.

Mosaic doesn't even want to load that.

Also, I'm cheating with a version of Lynx from 1999 to download stuff. Seems to be the least hassle way to get files into the VM since I can't use FTP and NFS is unreasonably slow for some reason. It handles downloads better than the more period correct version and can display many HTTP sites, obviously SSL is out of the question.

DOSEMU running MS-DOS 3.3 in Slackware pre-1.0 Beta

This is DOSEMU, a virtual machine for DOS first released in 1992, this is an early 1993 build. It predates DOSBox by a decade. You have to use an actual DOS disk to get it running, it isn't a complete emulator like DOSBox. Later on it was packaged with FreeDOS.

I have color now, PCem can emulate the Tseng card among others. Same hard drive image, just reconfigured X. I tried to push the resolution further (1152x900) with various emulated cards and got a corrupted display every time. Later versions of X don't have a problem at that resolution.

Running DOS programs in color with the help of xdos. This game didn't actually run, it crashed immediately but it looks cool. Can only do text mode at this point, some simple things ran acceptably. Could've shown a random text adventure game, they worked, but aren't that interesting to look at.

This ASCII version of Space Invaders worked OK.

Here is Mosaic displaying the only page it knows how.

[In Color]

I was watching a bit of NCommander's Slackware 1.1 stream and saw how he built NetHack. I'd attempted before, knowing little of NetHack myself, but some compile errors stopped me. When he was going through some files I saw an X11 client was possible, had to see what that was about. Not sure how playable it is, it runs though.

Also, notice that is kernel 0.99.pl9-15 and it was 0.99.pl9-2. I rebuilt that kernel a lot. I also learned from his stream the early NE2000 driver doesn't detect IRQs properly after a certain CPU speed. I'd been using PCem as a 386 not knowing exactly why my NIC wouldn't work at faster speeds. High clocked Pentium feels like a rocketship.

One failure of my expedition of kernel building was the NE2000 driver was not there in whatever version of NetKit this was. It was in separate patches I later found in /usr/src. I also had to edit those patches because kernel parameters weren't really a thing at this point and set an IRQ to stop autoprobing. Second failure was me forgetting which LILO entry was the new one and rebuilding a couple times wondering why it was still probing.

Adding to the included OPENLOOK environment I've built xvnews, I managed to connect to a free NNTP that doesn't require a login. Unfortunately it is only their own boards, but short of running my own local NNTP relay I'll settle for this.

Stumbled across a lone file called xdebt.c on a December 1992 X11R5 disc from Walnut Creek. Shows the national debt at the given date. My clock must be set pre-y2k because I don't feel like patching it, Linux wasn't compatible at the time.

Also, I mainly compiled it because I saw the name of the programmer. Jamie Zawinski (JWZ) made the well known xscreensaver and later ported Netscape to UNIX. The screensavers did not come with my install either, but I found it on that same disc. Netscape won't run yet unfortunately, it needs a libc a few months newer.

Found this neat thing called xmartin on the X11R5 disc, generates a background for you. Need to get a video of it because it draws right on the screen, it doesn't generate an image that you later set to the background.

It also doesn't save to a file, you'd have it save it separately or generate it every time, takes forever even on a Pentium. It does random for any parameter you don't give it. I just gave it -bg grey10 to make this.

Don't use too many colors though or X can't allocate enough and will steal from the root window to keep applications happy. I might try to make a theme with it.

A little more about xmartin and a kinda cool randomly generated background I've since lost.

Current developer of FVWM3 made a comment on my xmartin video, figured I should at least dig up the earliest FVWM I could. This is 0.91 from late 1993.

Background is another xmartin creation that has since vanished. Way too many colors to be practical.

Got the source for this very early MPEG player along with a demo file from a Yggdrasil disc. Playback is fine on a Pentium, at least at that resolution. Might try encoding some other stuff and see what is practical. If you read the bottom you'll see even obtaining MPEG videos to test their player with was difficult, the other demo file was a drinking bird toy animation.

Normal CPU Load is usually 1/2 or so on playback, it was probably high because I'd been moving and resizing windows.

These are from 1993 and inspired by the Windows version released in 1990. XVmines uses the XView library, I believe xmines is just Xlib.

This version of xmines builds as xbomb due to a conflict with a preexisting X11 game called xmines. It doesn't allow resizing of the playfield or changing the number of bombs. XVmines does allow customization.

This is that preexisting version of xmines. This predates Windows Minesweeper and the gameplay is slightly different. You can only interact with tiles beside the tiles you've already cleared or marked and it doesn't auto-clear the zeros. The rest of the concept is the same though.

There was a another Minesweeper game called Sweeper, it used XView libraries, but I couldn't get it to actually run.

I can't seem to find the source to Xpooltable 1.2 anywhere, only binaries that aren't compatible. That version was available in mid-'93, but 1.1 from mid-'92 builds fine.

Happen to notice how I had to extract that archive? GNU Tar didn't support gzip compression yet, so I have to zcat then pipe to tar.

I found Xpooltable 1.3 source from a little later in 1993 after some digging. Still extremely basic, more of a physics demo than a game. No automatic scoring.
Cheat button to has been replaced by "No Traj" "Traject", it just has a line for the trajectory of the ball.

This is the Chimera web browser, It uses the Mosaic libhtmlw engine and Xaw based UI. Mosaic used the non-free (at the time) Motif toolkit. I edited the X resources to get rid of the yellow theme. Inline images are possible, but it takes more configuration.

From what I can tell the project started in late '93, but 1.50 from mid '94 is the earliest source I could find. There was a point when a Mozilla based browser had the name Chimera, which makes searching more difficult.

Chimera is actually able to display a few pages. Discovered this site recently and Mosaic 1.2 won't display it either. This is using a much newer libhtmlw than Mosaic 1.2, not sure how well it would work if I managed to find a much earlier version.

I've been trying to find tkWWW 0.7, it should build with the version of Tk/Tcl I have and is correct for the time period. I've only found 0.8+.

Forgot I built pinfocom a while ago, the Infocom text adventure interpreter.

Never got into text adventures, or played this, but I like Douglas Adams.

Neat looking file manager I found under the name xdesktop, but apparently it is called Hendrikomander. It isn't working very well, not sure if it is incompatibility or general bugginess. Clicks are only occasionally registering.

Also, I built ImageMagick with that newfangled JPEG support. That was a sample image that came with the JPEG library. It also came with tools to compress/decompress JPEG files from the command line. You could pipe the output to something that didn't support JPEG.

I saw theoldnet.com had a simpler version of the site, figured I'd give Mosaic 1.2 a shot at it. It can actually display the text at least. That makes 2 pages reachable online it can almost display.