Afterstep on Red Hat 5.1

Story: I started a new job as a system engineer in December 1998, it was the heyday of Windows 9x and NT 4.0. First day on the job, the guy who was sitting across from my assigned desk was running something strange and insanely cool looking on a giant CRT monitor. I was mesmerized by the spinning window animations, the virtual desktops, the cool icons, the falling snow... I struck up a conversation with him, asked him what kind of system he was running there. He told me he was running Linux and this was the Afterstep window manager. Turns out he was the local sysadmin there as well as a Linux evangelist and someone I got along with instantly.

I had already been curious about Linux and wanted to try it, so he gave me a copy of Red Hat 5.1 to install on my home PC and I started my journey there. 25 years later I still run Linux, the expertise I developed with it has helped me immensely in my career and I'm still friends with my former coworker.