What is on Your Mind?

ATT Xenix on an orignal IBM PC.. it was an install on about 30 5.25 floppies... didn't know anything about Unix or Linux at the time....

Horrible experience with Ubuntu 8.04 as a liveCD to install PureData Extended and mess around with it.
Everything was breaking and I couldn't find the cause, little did I know that it didn't give me a warning when the virtual filesystem (which was entirely located in RAM) was getting full.
Went to the #ubuntu channel on freenode and started asking around, that's when I came in contact with the shell commands. I had no idea what I was doing, and what power the commands had when ran with the right privileges. So I accidentally wiped a whole system partition. That's where I learned the powers of the shell... The hard way.

All in all I swore never to touch Linux (-related OS'es) again until a friend of a friend of mine sat down with me and explained the basics of how Linux worked and the power of the shell. I was amazed at the flexibility of the system and that's where I learned the powers of clear explanation
Afterwards I picked up a book called "How to teach yourself UNIX in 10 Minutes" and everything went better than expected. Fast forward a couple of years and I bought a cheap dualcore Atom netbook and installed CentOS 5 on it to experiment with various stuff on it like web hosting.
I am still using Windows as my main OS but that's primarily because of certain DAWs (Ableton Live in particular). However, I'm still interested in learning about *nix systems because I'm always eager to learn things which I don't understand yet.

for unix my first was SunOS 2.5 in about 1992.

for linux my first was redhat 5.2 in about 1996.

My first Unix was TNIX (Unix version 7) in 1984.
My first Linux distribution was composed of a stack of floppies, SLS in 1993.

Red Hat

My friend got me Knoppix live cd saying "It's a Linux distribution, a different OS and you don't even have to install it". It was first year of my Engineering and I barely knew anything about UNIX/Linux. But that was the starting point. I started using the live CD regularly and started reading stuffs about Linux, UNIX, Shell & PERL scripting. Soon I found myself in love with all of these.

Installed Ubuntu as my primary OS. But it was too simple for a geek (no offense) who wanted to dig deep. Installed Fedora and that was my primary OS for 4 years while I was experimenting with RHEL/CentOS, OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, UnixWare anything that runs on x86 platform.

My first encounter with AIX happened at work. Just love poking around things, so I have my virtual infrastructure set up at my home.

I think most of the UNIX/Linux folks of my age started with Ubuntu or Knoppix.

Zilog 8000. Unix System 3, about 1985. Those were great days, the system had 1mb of memory, and two 40mb hard drives and an 8 port serial card. I sold it for about 15000 dollars with a 25 percent margin.