Many things were weird too me though, Kppp for example didn't support ISDN4Linux. Also connection on demand was not perfect, it would connect without the need. But that is another topic for another time.
Man, ISDN was a pain. But it was nice to be able to see a log of incoming (including missed) calls in the log file. ;-)
(By comparison, Wifi via NetworkManager has pretty much "justed worked" for me.)
Before ISDN, I had a 14.4kbit modem, so even single-channel ISDN at 64kbit was amazingly fast back then, to me. Dialing was faster with ISDN, but you did not get those cool sounds modems made. I still get nostalgia when I have to deal with fax devices and hear them screech. ;-)
Funny thing. You can run GNOME 1 over KDE 1
It also came with WordPerfect 8 but I don't know if I actually used it.
for a while Rasterman (of Enlightenment fame) was working for Red Hat and Gnome used Enlightenment as their WM.
But there came to a disagreement between Rasterman and the Gnome devs about where things were going, and he left Red Hat and started working on turning Enlightenment into a full DE.
Not long after i think we started seeing various WMs being bundled with Gnome, culminating in some that used composition and OpenGL to render the desktops as sides of a cube.
After that it seems that everyone involved with the major DEs got hooked on eyecandy.
These days I use tiling WMs (mostly XMonad), but if I were to go back to stacked then I'd probably end up with E16 after a while :)
I'm still using an $ECONFDIR that was initially created in ~1997 for exactly that reason. Everything else is either missing features (windowmaker) or slow (everything else).