Many moons ago I'd bootstrapped a Linux install on a circa-1990 laptop which afforded a floppy drive, serial, and parallel ports, but no innate networking (a 32-bit PCMCIA network card was later possible but required drivers and/or kernel support to be compiled).
I'd pieced together the install by splitting a tar.gz across multiple floppy transfers, then enabled SLIP and zmodem which permitted copying uu-encoded files for further support, then SLIP and PLIP. The latter was particularly useful as I could sustain multiple simultaneous network connections: both an SSH session and scp'ing across files for further support, rather than running a console under minicom. SLIP was bound at somewhere around 9600 AFAIR, fine for a terminal session, but cramping my style for file transfers. (It may have been faster, 38,400 and 56k are available modem rates.) PLIP IIRC was at or approaching Mb/s speeds, which was (comparatively) blazing.
Though the sheer audacity of copy-pasting uuencoded files through minicom had a certain coolness factor.
I'd pieced together the install by splitting a tar.gz across multiple floppy transfers, then enabled SLIP and zmodem which permitted copying uu-encoded files for further support, then SLIP and PLIP. The latter was particularly useful as I could sustain multiple simultaneous network connections: both an SSH session and scp'ing across files for further support, rather than running a console under minicom. SLIP was bound at somewhere around 9600 AFAIR, fine for a terminal session, but cramping my style for file transfers. (It may have been faster, 38,400 and 56k are available modem rates.) PLIP IIRC was at or approaching Mb/s speeds, which was (comparatively) blazing.
Though the sheer audacity of copy-pasting uuencoded files through minicom had a certain coolness factor.