I started with Perl CGI's and then used PHP some. It was't particularly beautiful stuff, and web programming was perhaps not looked on with as much favor, as 'real' programmers were doing things with C or C++.
When I got started with Linux, on a 386 with 4 megs of memory, I used jed though because the machine was so limited - even back in the mid 90ies it was a pretty limited machine.
Oh, and we didn't use source control either.
I played a little with Java Applets. I still remember waiting for them to start up.
I even wrote a airline-booking-system terminal program in Java, all before swing reared its ugly head!