Comment by jrootabega

4 years ago

In the mid-2000s I was using a nice single-floppy router distribution called freesco. I thought it worked pretty well, but I didn't put it under any stress.

I don't know if the project still has the same soul as it did then, but here it is:

https://www.freesco.org/

I found a small Pentium 100MHz desktop in the trash back then, stuck a spare pair of 3com NICs in it, and loaded up Turbolinux that I got with a Linux magazine.

Followed the Linux IP Masquerade HOWTO (http://www.e-infomax.com/ipmasq/howto/m-html/ipmasq-HOWTO-m....), and I soon had it running the network in my apartment building with a cable modem and 100mb SMC hub (also from a dumpster)

A couple weeks later I came home to find the internet "not working", it got hacked (I never applied updates), and I replaced it with Freesco and never looked back.

I had to click the link to find out it's not FreeSCO (i.e. Not a free version of SCO Unix), which would have been quite... surprising.

Buried deep into SCO's FTP server there still is a bootable single-floppy demo of SCO OpenServer intended for POS devices or so, but it's lacking any kind of GUI and most command line utilities...

  • Yeah, I seem to remember there being a steady amount of confusion over that at all times. I think it was supposed to be "free Cisco."