Hackaday ran a good-ol’-days story on Linux in the 1990s. So here’s my recollection, all IIRC.
I built a PC for Windows 95, with two 4MB sticks of RAM and an Asus motherboard from Egghead (reborn as newegg). It was very unstable and eventually I figured out the motherboard had something funky going on with the second RAM socket. Either stick would work fine very slowly with a lot of swap, or it would run at an acceptable speed for a week or two until Windows fell apart.
I knew enough Unix to get by from college and work, and somewhere along the way I found the linux distributions at Hastings bookstore. I think the first one I got was a book that came with Red Hat 5, then later the Linux for Dummies in the pic that came with a Red Hat 7 cd, (C)2001. There were also a lot of computer magazine that had different distributions.
I installed it a few times and played around but it never really hooked me. I remember being a little confused about why someone would need a single stand-alone Unix knock-off when I thought the whole point was networking. And the cheap windows-only printers and scanners I had would never work in linux. I think it was more than just lack of drivers, I don’t remember the details.
At work I had a Windows NT workstation with a 64-bit DEC Alpha and some kind of x-emulator that would let me remotely work in Unix. I think the Unix workstation was HP. When Windows 2000 came out, I used VMware to run a w2k virtual machine on the NT Alpha to have a playground away from the IT dept.
Links:
Reliving The Authentic 90s Linux Experience | Hackaday
DEC Alpha – Wikipedia
HP-UX – Wikipedia
Windows NT 4.0 – Wikipedia
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