I remember taking a c++ class back in highschool, and being really annoyed that I didn't have a copy of borland at home. My teacher told me about this system called 'unix', and I got a free shell account with the university of colorado, complete with a copy of g++. I could code from home! So I started really liking unix, and I emailed the admin to ask how I could get root (lol). He told me about linux. I bought a cd set copy of slackware because I was on 14.4 dailup at the time. I install it, and I remember being blown away at having so much software to compile basically any language I wanted! Still use linux as my daily driver ~ 25 years later.