@atoponce I had shell accounts on a lot of friends' machines, running mostly ancient Slackware releases. I think the #slackware floppies I made in 1995 were the first distro I actually installed on my machine in 1996. Must have been Slackware 2.3, maybe?

I got a DEC Multia around 1997 when they were going for cheap, and put the RedHat 5 release for DEC Alpha on there. My friends were so impressed that the `date` command on my system could calculate so far into the future past 2038!