20 years ago was 2002, only a few years after the dotcom boom in which people were most definitely searching for money.

There is plenty of great software right now, if you look for it carefully.

Also, most "great" software available in 2002 can still be accessed today.

You wouldn't want to run it though.

Which OS to start with?

- Windows? Unpatched Windows XP gets compromised within minutes on the internet. Microsoft spent years trying to fix all sorts of trivial security holes.

- Linux? Have fun with Mozilla 0.9 (pretty much the only browser choice)

- MacOSX? Only just recently released, not quite featureful as subsequent releases, and required you to buy expensive Mac hardware.

Why don't people run these systems on VMs on their browsers (it's quite feasible these days)? Because they aren't actually as good as the stuff we have today.

That's why Open Source (the "Individual-OSS", not "corporate/PR-OSS" that is also very popular today) is still great and pervasive. People writing code to solve their own problems, publishing the code for everyone to use if they want to, with no expectations of anything else than "Here is the code, do what you want with it".

I think you're missing a /s tag there, as 20 years ago was the end of the first dotcom boom, which was surprisingly similar to today in terms of vague business plans getting huge amounts of money thrown at them, and a lot of people getting into software for the money.

What's bad about searching for money?

Written by someone who obviously wasn't there 20 years ago lol..