Before I had a proper internet connection (had to ask permission to borrow a dial up account) I bought a magazine that had a picture of a cow on it saying that Larry the cow was different. It was a DVD image of the stage one mirror of this new fangled Gentoo thing.
Learnt from the magazine how to install a bootloader and so on and then "bravely" typed emerge world into the terminal after configuring the list of all the packages I wanted. Including a full desktop (KDE I think but may have been Gnome). And Firefox. And Open Office. And some multimedia stuff I don't remember.