As someone who grew up with Win 95 and remember the Atari and Amiga in the early to mid 90s, Linux would surely seem archaic even at that time. I'm sure my preteen cousin who was showing my even younger self cool games and apps on the Atari didn't write a single line of code and I doubt a large percentage of ordinary computer users were writing much code at the time. Someone using a computer could be seen as more technical to people who didn't want to touch it, but not more than a school kid showing her grandpa how to use an Android phone nowadays.
I think about tools like Hypercard, Applescript, and other systems that really allowed "users" to easily do things that today we might view as strictly the purview of "programmers". These kinds of things are no longer popular, but it's not because they were never popular, nor is it because they didn't "work." Our culture changed.
