I started my Linux journey (having being a user on SunOS previously) on a IBM ThinkPad 755CX with a Pentium-S. Installed Slackware from floppies, took literally days to compile a kernel or large program. Eventually I was using `slapt-get`, found that Ubuntu could have KDE installed, thought I'd had enough of config, make, make install (or `checkinstall -S`) and installed Ubuntu+KDE (and later Kubuntu).
I still prefer .deb packages so now I'm looking at jumping ship, probably to MX Linux as Ubuntu is using more and more snaps and so far they've just caused me problems; I also have philosophical objections (not necessarily well-founded in logic!) against monolithic packages.
Not sure why I started that reply, ... get off my lawn!
don't forget that in 96-98 we had S.u.S.E as the fourth biggest distro. And I remember that YaST managed dependencies with RPM in a user friendly way. Back in 1998-99 was my favourite distro because of that.
From the time I started to mess around with Linux, around 96-98, the biggest distros were certainly Slackware, Debian and Red Hat.
Slack you basically had to compile and config everything from scratch.
RH helped a bit with packaged software in RPM format but dependency management was missing. Basically a glorified tar ball.
apt solved the distribution and packaging of software.