my first linux

When chatting with H last week, I wondered where B is up to these days. He should have received his phd by now. So I googled him and found that he's become an assistant prof at NUS.

B installed the first ever linux distribution on my P133 dell during duing my freshman winter break. Redhat didn't even existed then. It was Slackware.
At that time, installing Linux was a non-trivial effort. I'm not sure whether SIPB supported it back then. I remember he had to do something with the fonts to start X.

I named that machine "cliff.mit.edu". I still remember its IP was something like 18.239.*.*. (We got the entire class B in a dorm. )
'cliff' had since accompanied me through all the years at college and grad schools. It had become a server after a few years, and at some point it had uptime more than a year.

The P133, 128MB (?), ~4GB HD hardware had to retire at some point. I also lost the hostname after i graduated. But the 'spirit' still lived on. I had since named my office machine 'cliff'.

I first met B when he went back to high school to talk about life at MIT. It was a 'dream', at that time.