Viewer David from Virginia Beach mailed Michael MJD a pair of forgotten promotional CDs he picked up at Linux World 2000, and those discs still hold complete, ready-to-boot virtual machines of Red Hat Linux 6.1 and SuSE Linux. VMware handed them out as marketing pieces that let Windows users try popular Linux distributions without hunting down ISOs or partitioning a hard drive. Each disc carries VMware 1.0.1 for Windows NT and Windows 2000 plus the Linux host version, a short readme, and a compressed virtual disk image already configured with a working guest OS.
The artwork on the cardboard sleeves is a dead ringer for Kraftwerk’s The Man-Machine album, with the exception that the title has been changed to Virtual Machine and the band members have been Photoshopped to resemble VMware’s founders. According to the Computer History Museum’s archives, VMware…
