Unfortunately you had to run Windows NT, which was a leap for most folks and had poor support for games and some other software written for Windows 9x (e.g. software that required DOS mode and wasn't compatible with NTVDM). Windows 2000 (Pro) was a bit more approachable, and then of course Windows XP (Pro) smoothed out most of the remaining wrinkles.

I ran Slackware on my BP6 while I was in college. Of course CONFIG_SMP wasn't set in the default kernel config at the time so you had to build your own. Great for running bind, apache, sendmail, etc., and of course NetQuake servers. :)