I'm afraid I have a rather pedestrian story. Like many folks in the 80s, we had a home computer, and in early high school I got kind of hooked on this idea of using a modem to call other computers. I remember one of the kids at school telling me, "don't use DOS unless you're afraid of speed." At the time, I had no real conception of what that meant, nor how fundamentally wrong it was, but hey, ok. Our home machine was actually a Mac, but I managed to convince the family that a PC clone running DOS would be a better machine.

Dad relented, a suitable machine was acquired and while it is likely the thing would have become another object gather dust, an unfortunate encounter with a solid object at a high rate of speed basically ended my changes of becoming a professional skateboarder and the (new) computer filled the void. As I was recuperating from that broken collar bone, I got into the idea of learning C.

My dad, an engineer, mentioned to me that the folks at his company were using Sun machines and the word "Unix" hung in the air. It was mysterious and cool. Eventually, I saved up enough money to order a copy of Coherent, which while interesting, was abstruse and opaque: let's face it, DOS was written to drive what amounted to souped up microcontrollers; things were pretty understandable in that world once you achieved a basic level of competence. But this Unix thing sounded intriguing and I wanted to learn more. Getting access was a challenge. Coherent didn't really seem like the thing.

About a year of DOS and some Coherent later, I fell in with a crowd of undergrads at the local university who were mostly CS/EE/Math majors and that cemented things: it pains me somewhat to admit it, but I got into Unix because that's what the cool kids were doing. I ditched DOS and Coherent and installed NetBSD. Interestingly, I found a Linux distribution somewhere, and we had that running in a lab for a while, but it didn't stick; I still thought BSD was better and at the time, that was probably (technically) true. Besides, we were mostly running RISC machines running various commercial Unix variants; the BSD/Linux stuff was just for messing around and/or for home use.

The one unique quirk in this anecdote is that, at some point, I did two weird things: 1) I saw an ad locally for a guy selling a DECstation running Ultrix and I bought it. I could never get X to work on my 486, but it sure worked on the DECstation, so I had a graphical environment at home. 2) I bought a VAX off USENET. Not a "real" VAX in the 10th edition sense, but a desktop VAXstation. I ran VMS on that. Both of those machines are probably still down in my basement somewhere.... Anyway, while the kids were running Linux at home, most people I knew really wanted a RISC workstation and I had one as well as a personal VAX. That definitely gave me some street cred for a while.

At some point I had learned enough technically to realize that Unix really was better than the alternatives I had access to; I liked VMS, but it was specific to a limited set of hardware and seemed more complex than Unix for little benefit. Some people claimed it was simpler, though; I'm not sure in what sense they meant, even today. Some of the college folks I was spending time with used the local mainframe (VM/ESA) a fair bit and RSCS was a big deal locally. I played around with it, but never found it all that interesting; it seemed to me that Unix did everything the mainframe could do, but, well, better.

So yeah, that's it: it's kind of sad, but I ran Unix because people told me Unix was better. And while on the one hand it was obviously better than DOS, I had limited exposure to other systems from which to form a real opinion about its relative merits with respect to similarly ambitious designs. I see now the superiority of the design relative to other common systems of the day, but that's a perspective developed after the fact, as opposed to something that I saw or felt at the time.

One more aside here: Doug lambasted the Macintosh earlier, but in retrospect I'm really glad that our first computer was a Mac. It was never a machine that was designed for command-line use; hence why something was simple as "Hello, World!" would be so complex. But it did have a regularity of interface and was simple enough that for years I never realized a computer could be any different. I didn't appreciate the value of those early lessons and how they shaped how I thought about how a system should work until much, much  later.

        - Dan C.