I would love to find a forum for Linux history like TUHS is for Unix
history.
I would too... The early days were fun to live through, but much of what I recall from the time isn't mentioned much, if at all, anymore.
Warner
Those days were fun. I just went down memory lane with the book "Rebel Code" by Glyn Moody. Good stuff.
How different those days were, for me at least. I was just a Linux advocate, enthusiast, and hobbyist until 2000 or so, when I started work as a sysadmin. Red Hat Enterprise Linux was not yet a thing. It was just Red Hat, i.e. just another distro, just one voice of many that were shaping the future of the OS. Nowadays, in the corporate world at least, Red Hat IS Linux, or rather, Linux is whatever Red Hat says it is.
That isn't entirely a bad thing. Gentoo is great for my personal use, in the same way that FreeBSD is. But if I have to support a few hundred servers, I'd rather do it with vSphere, RHEL, and Ansible.