[nidx]

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.

[yesbabyyes]

I had been exposed to some of those, plus SunOS, Solaris, VMS, AmigaOS, QNX, Red Hat and Debian.

There was no such thing as a OS-monoculture.

[oriolid]

At that time you'd have been mercilessly about mIRC. It's a client program, and you'd be on IRCnet, EFnet or QuakeNet, and the the last one would earn you endless disrespect from IRCnet veterans.