You're right. I said "for any interest" but obviously, like all things attention there's a power law distribution. Many Windows programmers, or anything else that had massive interest. But if you were a Unix kernel nerd, there weren't many Unix kernel nerds around. If you were a Perl programmer, there weren't that many Perl programmers.

But even given the prevalence of Windows development, it was still rare to encounter another programmer socially unless you lived in the occasional city where they were common. My point is that nerds finding nerds was a much rarer thing back then.