The Technomancer’s Tales — Stories of Compute from 8088 to the Modern Era, #4 Slackware and the 14.4k Gauntlet | by Cypher619 | Sep, 2025

Long before Red Hat came onto the scene, before graphical installers and bootable ISOs, I installed Slackware Linux the real way — one floppy at a time.

• 📥 Downloaded the full install set over a 14.4k modem
• 💾 Wrote out over 50 3.5″ floppy disks
• Carefully labeled: t1, t2, s1, s2, a1, a2 — each one a tiny piece of the puzzle
• Each disk took 15–30 minutes to download — if the connection didn’t drop
• 💀 Half the time the floppies failed mid-install and had to be redone
• 🧠 No GUI, no walkthrough — just raw CLI and a keyboard-driven text installer

I remember:

• Fighting with LILO to not brick my MBR
• Trying to get XFree86 working with a shady S3 or Cirrus Logic card
• Learning fdisk, mount, chmod, and vi all at once — because survival depended on it

There was no room for error.

You either figured it out… Or you wiped the drive and started all over again.

Why It Mattered

That install taught me more about:

• Partitions
• Bootloaders
• Kernel modules
• File permissions
• Package managers (okay, installpkg was primitive — but it worked)

…than any book or classroom ever could.

Slackware didn’t hold your hand. It handed you a brick and said “build a system or die trying.”

And I did.

Linux wasn’t just an OS — it was a rite of passage.

🧠 Slackware, Source Code, and the Birth of a Kernel Wizard

Once I got Slackware running — after surviving the 50-floppy install over 14.4k — I didn’t just use Linux.

I started compiling it. Building custom kernels from source. And by that time, I was already writing in C and C++ — not copy/pasting, but building real systems-level logic.

What Kernel Building Looked Like

• Grabbed the latest kernel source from a sketchy FTP mirror or a university server
• Extracted with tar -xzvf into /usr/src/linux
• Ran make config or make menuconfig — and knew what every option meant
• Trimmed unnecessary drivers and options to slim the kernel for my exact hardware
• Rebuilt and installed with make bzImage, make modules, make install
• Prayed LILO didn’t nuke my bootloader again

If the kernel panicked?

I didn’t reinstall. I fixed it.

C/C++ Was My Daily Driver

By this point I was:

• Writing custom utilities and tools for my own machines
• Hacking on existing apps to change behavior
• Reading and modifying kernel-level source
• Understanding memory management, pointers, structs, and signal handling
• Fixing bugs in programs compiled from source — because why wait for a patch?

Linux was alive, and I was speaking its language.

I wasn’t a developer because someone hired me. I was a developer because I had to be — just to keep the damn system working.

That combination of C/C++ knowledge and Linux internals set the foundation for everything I’d do next — Especially once the county handed me an entire digital infrastructure and said:

“Here. You run it.”

🎓 Still in High School. Already Root.

By the time I was compiling Linux kernels and writing in C/C++, I wasn’t in college.

I wasn’t in a bootcamp.

I was in 11th grade.

A junior in high school, walking into class like everyone else — Except instead of algebra homework, I was:

• Debugging kernel panics
• Writing memory-efficient tools in C for my Slackware install
• Burning backup boot disks with LILO configs
• Downloading man pages over dial-up to understand syscall behavior

While my classmates were discovering AOL and printing out banner text from Print Shop, I was rebuilding operating systems from source.

Linux wasn’t a curiosity. It was my proving ground.

And every compile, every crash, every config file I rewrote — It all sharpened the tools that would later run County infrastructure.

Even if I didn’t know that yet.