Slackware in ‘93.

I would get stuck and have to change the jumpers on my SCSI drive, reinstall MS/DOS, reinstall Telemate, dial into a BBS with a UUNET gateway, find help or post a question and wait for an answer and then try again. I just left the case off my Packard Bell 286 and the drives were never screwed in. It took me a couple weeks to get it running in this fashion.

SLIP/PPP connections required you to gin up your own connection script to get into your ISP. So even after I had red hat installed I had to reinstall DOS a few times to get the modem working.

Clark.net was one of the first ISP’s in the country offering dialup accounts commercially it was pretty amazing to access Usenet without a proxy and to get onto IRC from my own box and not through a shell on their servers.