If you got the best supported video card and best supported sound card etc (like I said, built the PC with Linux in mind), they worked. It wasn't for everyone,

If you got the best supported video card and best supported sound card etc (like I said, built the PC with Linux in mind), they worked. It wasn't for everyone, it wasn't polished but I thought it was awesome to have your own graphical Unix box and be connected to the community building Linux. I had a lot of fun. You could browse the web, listen to mp3s (if you had a 100 MHz 486), learn Emacs and Perl and Python and C, get to know how everything on the Internet worked including security aspects by playing with all the server software. All this for free and on cheap hardware. The old 1995 Linux box is less interesting to play with than the stuff in your list because all the stuff in your list became extinct and aren't just retarded versions of their modern incarnations.