SSH was around, but not nearly as pervasive it is today. I have memories of having to shake my mouse around during the windows client installation to generate entropy. Fun times
What you're describing is PuttyGen. According to Wikipedia, the first Putty release was in 1999. Archive.org doesn't have any snapshots of the Putty website before 2000, so that checks-out.
The RSA patent didn't expire in the US until September 2000, so that's when free implementations like OpenSSH first became widely available. That's precisely when I started using it...
The original SSH was first released mid-1995. There would have been a small number of installations in 1996, but absolutely negligible. It was not well-known until later, circa 2000.
On HN there's always a good chance you're talking to some of the people involved in those "negligible" installations. I know that I submitted some patches to Tatu Ylönen for Ssh to compile on Ultrix, so that must have been in 1995 or early 1996 because after that I didn't have access to any Ultrix machines. I may have been an early adopter, but it didn't take long for ssh to take over the world, at least among Unix system administrators; at Usenix within a year everybody was using ssh because there wasn't any alternative and in terms of security it was a life-saver.
As for the RSA patent... I don't know what license the original Ssh was released under, but it was considered "freeware" when it came out and nobody cared about the US RSA patent. Maybe technically in the USA you shouldn't have used it? Nobody cared.
And the mouse-jiggling thing... not specifically a PuttyGen thing. On linux /dev/random device gave you a few bits at a time stingily, only after it had enough entropy, so it was common for programs that needed good randomness to ask you to jiggle the mouse because that was one of the sources of entropy, so bits random bits would come faster. I'm pretty sure that was still the case well into the Zips.
it fixed by itself, without any fixes from my part. happened many times.
asked for help to a senior, guy ran strace and found a read waiting in /dev/random. and of course it solved by itself any time I checked because I was moving the mouse!
controversially but acceptably, we had linked it to urandom and move on
how fast that guy used strace and analyzed the syscalls inspired me to be better at linux
That doesn't seem to be accurate. Wikipedia says, by the end of "2000 the number of users had grown to 2 million"
> everybody was using ssh because there wasn't any alternative
I already listed TWO of the most popular alternatives.
> the mouse-jiggling thing... not specifically a PuttyGen thing. On linux
Parent specifically said "windows client installation." Putty was very common on Windows. PuttyGen specifically and prominently told the user to move their mouse... etc. etc.