Hi Konstantin,

Konstantin Olchanski <[log in to unmask]> writes:

> This happened right after the first quad-PentiumPro machines became
> available, with Dell dual-PentiumII/III to follow soon after.

Yes and it's why www.phy.bnl.gov is running on a system that still
caries the (internal) hostname "phyppro1"!

> I am not sure what happened with Debian at that point. We certainly knew
> about it, one of Debian founders worked with us. We also knew about Slackware.

I guess this was maybe Perens?  He came to the "Open Source / Open
Science" workshop held at BNL in 1999.

  https://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/1999/bnlpr090899.html

I attended that as a grad student and joined the lab shortly after.

Cheers,
-Brett.