I've been always a keyboard/gamepad die-hard due to the gaming genres I like so I saw little appeal in analog PC joysticks. My first home PC came with a horrible Genius joystick which I never used and promptly lost, and back in the 90s it seemed like 75% of the people I knew which owned a home PC had some sort of analog joystick sitting on a shelf collecting dust, I guess retailers just gave them away. They almost always used suction cups which didn't hold jack on your standard computer desk and the calibration knobs were a joke. The people I knew who were into flight sims and stuff had better gear, so I didn't see the point of these cheapo analog joysticks, gamepads would've been much more useful. Now I probably have a box full of them sitting around somewhere, thanks to people giving them to me over the years. 😵
The first time when I really started using a controller for some PC games was back in the early 2000s when I found out you could connect console gamepads to the parallel port. I wired up a pair of knockoff SNES controllers and I used them until they broke (which wasn't very long) but I still preferred gaming with the keyboard. As years went by I shifted from PC gaming to console gaming, and eventually got my hands on a Gravis PC GamePad and a Gravis GamePad Pro USB, and I have to say I've been thoroughly enjoying playing the PC platformers of my youth with a gamepad. 😀