Your story also reminded me of the early LUG scene, distributed all over the world. We believed and all we had access to were the dirtiest ratshit computers but hey they could boot Slackware or Debian and maybe if you said the right incantation you could get that 10Mb card you got for free but was still the most valuable part to work with cat5 Ethernet so you could download stuff from a local sunsite mirror so you could join in the future.