Personal anecdote time. I'm probably a bit younger than most of the folks here and my first exposure to computers came when my father bought a shiny new Northgate 486 in 1990. He'd been talking about getting a computer for a few years and had been researching getting some sort of Unix, but even it was all too expensive even for someone who could buy a 486 in 1990. By the time I got interested in Unix-y systems (partly by reading a copy of _Life With Unix_ that my dad had bought back before we go our first computer), Linux was the cheapest game in town: free on CDs from the back of books in the public library.

Mike