At the time, I had used/tried out the following OSes - BeOS 4.5 (including some beta versions) - BeOS 5 (including some beta versions) - Windows NT 4.0

At the time, I had used/tried out the following OSes - BeOS 4.5 (including some beta versions) - BeOS 5 (including some beta versions) - Windows NT 4.0 - OS2/Warp - Windows 95 (and it's service releases) (including beta versions) - Windows 98 (and it's service releases) (including beta versions) - PC-DOS - MS-DOS with DosShell - MS-DOS with Windows 3.11 - Whatever old version of MacOS was on the school computers - Slackware (might have some dates wrong) I was also on mIRC and downloading from newsgroups regularly. I think many ISP's would give you guides about using email/newsgroups back then as those services were considered required for an ISP. TUCOWS was super popular for this newfangled WinSOCK software (TUCOWS stands for The Ultimate Collection Of WinSOCK Software). I remember testing how fast the first consumer cable internet connections were by downloading from them. You are right for most people that stuff was probably obscure.