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As a person who wasn't a linux admin back in the 90s,

Nobody was a Linux admin in the ‘90’s: we ran HP-UX, IRIX, OSF/1 DECUnix (and Ultrix), AIX, Solaris and NetBSD; those were our Linux we grew up on like you grew up on a Linux ISO on your parents’ PC bucket.

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I ran a small ISP on a pair of Linux (Slackware probably) boxes, a Livingston Portmaster, a bank of Hayes modems, and a T1 in the mid-90s. So some of us were Linux admins then.

Me too. Maintained a small (100 or so) fleet of Slackware Linux desktops for a support org in the early 90's. Rare, but did exist. Was the install 13 1.44mb floppies? Seems to ring a bell. Lots of waiting for the prompt to switch out the floppy. And a more intimate relationship with "dd", "kermit", etc, than I remember ever encountering again.

Also, whoever wrote x3270. Thank you!

That's crazy: Linux isn't rightly usable even now 20+ years later, and you ran it in mid '90's when it could barely boot a shell reliably. And Slackware no less, which meant dumping tape archives everywhere instead of package management.

Crazy.

We have a 1999 VA Linux box still "in production" (just to see how long it will go, at this point. Nothing mission-critical.)

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