[brudgers]

I bought a book about Redhat. I bought it in a bookstore on a weekend. The book had a CD-ROM in the back. There was a distribution on it. I recall that Redhat Linux was already enough of a thing I had been reading of it for a few years. In printed magazines.

But that's not what Redhat actually was. Redhat was a support company. Corporations buying per seat and per server support contracts is what made Redhat a business. Having a Linux distribution was a way of productizing Linux support. There was a clear value proposition to an enterprise customer base. Redhat wasn't a guerilla operation.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redhat#Business_model

[foobarbaz33]

ditto this. I bought a random linux book with a redhat CD. My first linux experience. I went through college with that distro on my desktop PC.