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.
I remember buying a bunch of old HP ISA 100Mbit NICs to turn an old computer into a router/server combo. Naive as I was I put them all in and nothing worked. Turns out they were all configured to use the same IRQ (since they likely came from independent machines), and that caused them to overwrite each others settings… including the MAC adress. Thankfully I found some nice hacker that worked with these cards before and published a little C tool to rewrite their EEPROMs. I contacted him if he sees a chance to resurrect the cards and that saint indeed hacked the necessary features into his tool so I could rewrite the MAC adresses, change the IRQ one by one and ended up with a working network. Good times.