For those veteran linux people, what was it like back in 90s? I did see and hear of Unix systems being available for use but I did not see much apart from old versions of Debian in use.
Were they prominent in education like universities? Was it mainly a hobbyist thing at the time compared to the business needs of 98, 95 and classic mac?
I ask this because I found out that some PC games I owned were apparently also on Linux even in CD format from a firm named Loki.
Heard about linux from someone at school in -95, I was 15 at the time. No idea where he had heard about it. Brought a stack of floppy disks and downloaded slackware on a school computer. Of course some of the disks had read errors so had to copy them again the next day but eventually I got slackware installed. In spring of -96 redhat 3.0.3 was released which I for some reason bought the full version of, still have the box in my bookcase. Since then I have been a pretty much 100% linux desktop user. Well 95% since I was dual booting windows for games for a long time.
I spent a lot of time back then learning linux by experimentation and hanging out on IRC talking to people about linux. As others have said, you had to compile the kernel because there were no kernel modules (had forgotten about that!) and I remember being quite fast in navigating the kernel configuration menus. I wouldn’t even know where to start nowadays! :)