zlacker

"Risky", it sounds so strange now to call dual booting "risky". But it was a different time, where remediating a borked software change wasn't google-able.

Edit: @throwawayx38: I 100% agree with you! Thanks for your reply.

>>metada+(OP)
To be fair, it may not have been the dual boot itself that was risky.

Unless they had a dedicated harddrive, they would also need to resize existing fat32/ntfs partitions and add a couple of new partitions for Linux. This process had a certain risk.

>>metada+(OP)
Heh, I meant it in a tongue in cheek way. My dad thought it was too risky.

>>time0u+2k
I understand, that's what I found amusing. It's easy to imagine a dad in the 90s, when computers were much more costly, being like "hell no you aren't doing that to the family computer!" :)

Maybe I'm still misinterpreting, but this was where my mind went. Man, I wish I could've appreciated how distinct the 90s were as a kid, but I was too young and dumb to have a shred of hope of being that aware!

>>metada+Gk
In the era of that kind of PC, I remember the boot loaders being a bit more touchy.

I never 'totally borked' a PC with LILO but definitely had to fix some things at least once, and that was with a nice thick Slackware 7.1 book to guide me.

GRUB, IIRC, vastly improved things but took a little while to get there and truly 'easy-peasy'

>>throwa+U8
I have vague memories from early days of using Linux that you used to have to manually set the modeline for your videocard in X11 - if you got things wrong you could potentially permanently damage the monitor.