I believe your recollection is off by several years...
What you're describing is PuttyGen. According to Wikipedia, the first Putty release was in 1999. Archive.org doesn't have any snapshots of the Putty website before 2000, so that checks-out.
The RSA patent didn't expire in the US until September 2000, so that's when free implementations like OpenSSH first became widely available. That's precisely when I started using it...
The original SSH was first released mid-1995. There would have been a small number of installations in 1996, but absolutely negligible. It was not well-known until later, circa 2000.
What you're describing is PuttyGen. According to Wikipedia, the first Putty release was in 1999. Archive.org doesn't have any snapshots of the Putty website before 2000, so that checks-out.
The RSA patent didn't expire in the US until September 2000, so that's when free implementations like OpenSSH first became widely available. That's precisely when I started using it...
The original SSH was first released mid-1995. There would have been a small number of installations in 1996, but absolutely negligible. It was not well-known until later, circa 2000.