1998, was so long ago. I was 8 years old! The Kernel was released the year I was born. Then, in like 2011 I first heard of Linux and downloaded Ubuntu 10.
Read the whole paragraph, the 1998 was about mounting public NFS share.
Now they want to discontinue FTP. Two different things.
The Linux kernel was released in 1991. If you were born in 1991 you were 6 or 7 in 1998.
I was working at a high school as systems/network administrator using NT 3.5/4., Novell Netware 3,4,5 and
SuSE linux 5.x. Doesn't seem so long ago to me.