What he said.

I was a VMware workstation user in the late 90s.

I worked on the VMware monitor team back in 2007-2008, which probably put my employee number way in the 1000s. Ole Agesen, Carl Waldspurger, and other early folks were still there.

Back then "kvm" meant a remote keyboard/video/mouse device. Linux kvm was announced in 2006, and released in 2007, and required hardware virtualization, which was first released with AMD Pacifica in 2006. Back then VMware's binary translation was locked up in patents, so in the free software world we had Xen, colinux, and other hacks.