Wow, this brings me back to the crazy days of college in the fall of 1994. My roommates and I ran a mish-mosh of OSs, including Windows (3.11), OS/2, and Linux (Slackware distro). The last was certainly the biggest challenge, but once we had remote xterms to campus servers, there was no need to slog to a computer lab.

I also remember the era of free access to things. I had an account on some Stanford systems "just in case I wanted to run some stuff". It was a totally different time.