VAX/VMS was still around then, and as far as I recall, that was the king for uptime.
Linux back then supported much less hardware. I can remember even in the early aughts, there was while families of popular wireless network chipsets that weren’t supported.
VAX/VMS was such a beast! The hardware wasn’t readily available to the public, though.
Oh, the wireless chipsets in the 90’s into about 2005? or so…that was a bad time for anyone trying to run wireless. Hell, MS Windows didn’t even have network drivers baked in until what, WinXP? Wiring computer together in the 90’s was such a a trial, both for hardware and software fronts.
I was lucky to score a 3Com 3c905b fast 10/100 Ethernet card from a bussy in 1996. That was well supported across the board (Linux and Windows), and the IRQ settings for the PCI bus memory mapped I/O and IRQs was well documented.
Edit: buddy, not a hussy, though he kinda was… Your call in how you want to read it.
