alt Hacker NewsWell, I was and I know plenty of others that did the same. Slackware was 1993. By 1995 we even had Red Hat.
In 1995 NCSA was running just fine and from December onwards there was Apache. I had the first commercial version of the cam software out (which ran on SGI) and a year later it ran on PCs as well.
You and your friends were probably hobbyists, hackers or small hosters. Datacenters (remember Exodus?) were full of Sun hardware, racked up & labelled with the ‘hot’ startups of early dot-com.