Yes, and made plenty of people rush to GCC's implementation effort, which was largely ignored until that moment.

This is part of why I specified “on my computer.” I used to use university/work systems and whether it was paid for separately or as part of the OS, I generally had a variety of compilers available to me. My personal favorite oddity was that IBM had two different Pascal compilers for VM/CMS. One was called Pascal/VS and the other VS/Pascal. One was slightly more capable than the other, but I don't remember which it was or what, precisely the difference was. It never came up in compiling TeX and its related software. I do remember the long process of installing PL/I on the UIC mainframe back in the 80s though.

I'd add that in the early 90s, Linux was very much a fringe OS. I had contemplated running FreeBSD (or was it BSDFree?), but as I only had one computer and getting a second seemed an unimaginable expense, I never did so (I don't think virtual machines on x86 were a viable thing yet either).

It's wasn't much of a prize. At school, the Sun C++ compiler, required for the OOP class, was responsible for a lot of people switching out of CS.