I remember getting a pal at Cambridge University (nice fat pipe to the hosting sites) to email the disk images as uuencoded files to me where I was working - in 64Mb slices requiring tedious extraction and reconstruction. My employers didn't really get the internet and even their email was on the X400 suite rather than SMTP. Awful given that they were a major international computer company.

I still think it's a shame that Linux missed their first big chance. At that time Windows For Workgroups 3.11 was the de facto standard. Linux was a massive distance ahead in most respect but didn't have the applications. It kept that lead until NT 4.1 came out and it's only recently with the Ubuntu distributions and the general move to web applications that I've started to be hopeful that it can finally displace Windows.

Which is a shame because now that the technical advantages are diminished (or maybe even surpassed) I no longer care.