There's a big difference between 1991 and just a few years later of course, but even when I graduated from college (1996), Microsoft was absolutely suffocating. I had decided that I wanted to work for a computer company and that I had zero interest in working on Windows NT(or Copland). This left one company, Sun Microsystems, which even in 1996 was not really recruiting at universities. I got a job there by cold e-mailing a Sun engineer (Jeff Bonwick) based on a Usenet post in comp.unix.solaris. (Cold e-mailing to get a job was so unusual that a friend of mine who was a reporter for the AP wrote a story about my job search -- and it was broadly picked up nationally![0]) At Sun, I was the youngest person in OS development by a decade, and the industry broadly thought Sun to be foolish for insisting on innovating in the operating system. Conventional wisdom was wrong, of course, and I had a great 14-year run at Sun that I wouldn't trade for anything -- but it would be a mistake to overly romanticize what was honestly a pretty crappy era.
[0] I talked about this briefly in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IznEq2Uf2xk, including an (embarrassing) photo of me ca. 1996 that ran as the front page of many business sections around the US