What do you mean by IRC war? Programming the bots yourself, occupying channels? Because if that’s what you were thinking, it’s familiar to me too. Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, and then I arrived at IRC, where I spent quite a long time.
During my work, I mainly worked in a Windows environment, and for a long time in a Novell network (if that name means anything to someone).
However, Mandrake Linux is one of the five traditional distributions from which today’s are derived. This is exactly the distro I have come across the least.
Apparently someone routed archive.org to its original address. When I clicked “free download” I was redirected to archive.org.
https://web.archive.org/web/19991012033002/http://linux-mandrake.com/en/fdownload.php3
Just a note to answer the topic question
How close are you to IT
I am extremely close - my brain is long strains of 0’s and 1’s.
My first encounter was around 1976 - I was an apprentice in a Bosch electonicsdealer and repairshop’s warehouse - I went to school and was introduced to punchcards and papertape.
I didn’t get it then though - I was to busy chasing beer, weed and female.
Later I got married - shifted through jobs and in late 80’ies landed at a job as locksmith - a progressive one as we were one of two out a dozen locksmitths which were used a programmable computer controlled keymaker.
My first programming tool was QBasic - later QuickVisual Basic on Windows - I bought my first computer - and as I recall QuickVisual Basic 2 at horrifying sums.
Only a few years later I was on my own as octopus - doing locksmith jobs - opening almost everything that could be opened - fixing computer operatings systems, doing small networks, supporting a special - at the time very expensive danish ERP system - the authorized consultants was way above DKK1000 ex.vat at the time - so I made a decent living.
I did various programming creating explicit custom solutions - rs232 modem communication using cellular modem like Nokia (something 2 pcmcia card) and Siemens M20 - sending and receviing texts - customized to various use cases - like transport office to driver and back communication - one customer was brazil agency providing truckowners with jobs.
One of my oldest clients I still do contract work for - the danish distributor - subsidiary of Innotec serving the scandinavian countries - currently porting functionality from an old - you laugh - my own custom vb6 windows application - to a modern webapp using .NET 4 webapi backend with MSSQL database and a frontend built with Blazor WASM using dotnet 6 LTS and the C# language.
So IT is kind of my blood now.
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How close I am to IT, well, not very close. I come from a humanities, culture and linguistics background, and all my life I never had to interact with computers or technology at large as more than just a user. But I do like computers and spend a lot of time on the internet and on my computer to the point of being more than capable to troubleshoot and make sure (Windows) computers run optimally without issues. (Though a lot of the credit goes to being able to use internet search engines effectively…)
My Linux journey started in the second half of last year out of personal interest, and this year I plan to start seriously learning the basics of programming/computation. I wish to further my studies in computational linguistics and/or language technology after all, and I believe that jumping into Linux will give me an extra push to learn ahead haha. Also, the idea of being able to configure my computer to just do what I need it to do, without the bloat of baked-in programs and services I will never use, is very appealing. 
So to answer the title question, I’m not close to IT, however I think I know more than the average users, people around me about typical Windows computers. To Linux though I am almost completely new, I made the jump because 1) I was bored with Windows and wanted a new experience with my computer and then 2) realized that familiarizing myself with Linux can be beneficial in pursuing my future goals.
Novell
I have not heard that name for a long time. It is almost forgotten that there were non-TCP/IP, non-Ethernet networks before standardisation.
A room-mate worked on Ungermann-Bass networks. Now that is an obscure name - the company folded about 25 years ago but, strangely, it was one of the first to standardise on Ethernet and TCP/IP and actually helped Microsoft and Apple to standardise themselves.
(Before then it had a lot of proprietary stuff, including machines with two network cables - one of those proprietary networks was unidirectional. So you required one “out” cable and one “in” cable).
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Linguistics, mathematics and programming are certainly close to each other, aren’t they?
At the time, it was strange to me that the Novell network and the Windows network were present at the same time. In terms of permissions, I think Novell knew more than Windows, it was closer to Linux in this respect. Later, Novell and Suse also merged.
Yes, they are, very intriguing! Unfortunately, I have limited experience with the mathematical aspects of linguistic studies - there is no “pure” linguistics study at the undergraduate level in my country of residence, instead it exists as part of the humanities-languages studies. So naturally, my studies were steered much towards the sociocultural aspects of linguistics (also very interesting and broad). Statistics was of course part of my studies, but it was not a focus as I ended up pursuing qualitative research.
Indeed - the only network I knew when I started computers was Novell - I set them up using the dos netware client in a peer-to-peer like network. Later I setup a Netware server network - I cannot remember if it was 4 or 5 - later that was trashed in favor of Microsoft Server based network.
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they were (sort of) the first iteration of actual cyberwarfare: I don’t remember what triggered them, but loggin’ on a IRC server in that period was basically the equivalent of asking to get nuked (0 day telnet killswitch) or infected by custom viruses, or both. Before chanbots were invented (guess why they were invented? :D), you could manually takeover any chan with the right sequence of commands (and proper tools of the trade). It was an excellent tech gym, and you could meet awesome people doing crazy stuff.
I remember when one of my friends and I programmed an IRC bot in tcsh.
At that time, our internal network at work was connected to a Novell server, but at the same time it was also a Windows network. Novell had a very good mechanism for managing permissions.
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Similar experience for me… For quite a while we ran the 2 systems together, before the Windows people managed to sell the bosses on going all Windows (other than for actual production). I ended up leaving when they wanted us to use MS stuff in inappropriate places (Like Foxpro instead of db5). Apparently it was prettier, never mind that how slow (and we had 17,000,000 member datasets to process on a schedule!).
Alwayus preferred Novell to Win-based networks - permissions were so easy in 4…
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15yrs ago when i was 23 living in a squat/homeless somebody gave me a netbook with ubuntu and that’s pretty much how i started to learn how to use a computer. i’ve never had an interest in windows or mac and the rare times i’ve tried
either i wasnt a fan of the experience.
i use linux professionally but in a tech informed arts context rather than IT.
so for example i have an opening coming up this week that’s a collaborative work with another artist. for part of the installation we wanted to trigger media files from motion detection throughout the space. i figured hey you know what would be an easy and cheap way to do this, repurpose a bunch of crappy old laptops+netbooks and install linux; conceptually linux machines work more cohesively so win/win.
anyway now i’m staring at 2 suitcases filled with laptops loaded with a barebones EOS install that i need to lug onto an amtrak in 2 days. well 1 has vanilla arch because the installer didn’t work on 1 of 15 machines so far, we’ll see how the next 15 go.
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Well, yes, open source software offers a great range of programs for creative work, whether in visual arts or music. We often do not think that an operating system is not for its own sake, but for a certain purpose, and this does not only mean professional use in IT or at home, but also art and literature. There are no restrictions here, as with the use of closed source software.
Was connected with IT from 1980 to present. Now semi-retired but still program and use Linux on many machines. Used Digital Unix, AIX, Solaris and Linux along with DEC VMS - Tops-10 and Tops-20. No windows programming jobs!