I can only imagine, specially back when hardware and drivers were much bigger concerns for many! I find it quite amazing that Slackware 7 released in late 1999 [0] never had an end-of-life (EOL) specified according to Wikipedia [1] but Slackware 8.1 released in mid-2002 [2] received updates until August 1, 2012 [3], over 10-years of support which I find quite impressive for a non-enterprise-oriented distribution! That's not to mention the consistency and minimal interface and tooling changes between releases to this day.
