Good times!

I fondly remember learning that I could run Linux off of a floppy disk. A GUI session took two. You had to format the disks to hold slightly more data. tomsrtbt maybe?

Getting my first CD burner and having access to a whole CD worth of data at once was such a jump forward, even if half of them became coasters.

I burned several Linux boot cds with some games on them and took over an unused computer lab at the community college for a lan party. It lasted until someone came around asking why these computers were running when their system showed them as off. Fortunately they laughed it off when they realized we were just kids.

I do remember Knoppix. In particular, being able to recover my very important data (ok, fine, it was pirated music) from a computer that wouldn't boot anymore.