I was a pre-teen as well, using 0.99pl circa '92-93ish (fuzzy memory). I heard about it from IRC. At the time I was using a 2400 baud modem to dial up into Rutgers (an older friend's college account) to get a terminal. Rutgers supported SLIP so that you yourself could become a node rather than just getting a terminal. I wanted to try this so that I could use virtual terminals to IRC and still do other things and generally be more stable than trying to use DOS with a SLIP packet driver. So, it took a while to download a 0.99pl distro onto 3 floppy disks and even longer to get it working with little or no documentation, but in the end it was worth it!