The early releases of Linux were on floppy disks. More than 20 disks. You could not compile the kernel while X was running unless you had at least 8 Mb. I was the lucky owner of a 486dx33 with 16 Mb.
My first Linux distribution was Slackware 2.0, bought during 1995 Summer.
It came on a CD-ROM, whose contents I had to copy into the hard disk and start the installation from there, because IDE CD-ROM drives were mostly unsupported.
My monitor was 1024x768, but X could not do higher than 800x600 with my card.
Nowadays I have Ubuntu on my travel laptop, and still have hardware acceleration issues with its Brazos GPU.
Linux required a hardware FPU, which the 030 Mac IIsi did not have. I bought and installed a daughterboard that provided a math coprocessor, allowing me to install Linux on my Mac, circa mid 90s.
Why doing a podcast with a single presenter and getting BBC quality audio isn't that hard these day a decent 2x2 audio interface and some decent mics Shure Sm58's will do quite well with your preferred DAW which will often have presets for podcasts.
I was discussing the lead in with a colleague last week. There are just so many threads to how we arrived at where we are today simply in terms of operating systems. You could probably have a whole podcast series on that alone. I once helped write an expert witness report that tried to bring in all the AT&T, BSD, Unix Wars, etc. threads and it was hard to keep it comprehensible. Keeping it around Microsoft and Apple in their modern forms probably makes it more approachable for a broader audience.
* https://www.codenewbie.org/podcast
* https://www.codenewbie.org/basecs