I remember installing it in 92 or 93 when I was in grad school via a big pile of floppies. It was liberating to turn an otherwise useless PC into something more or less equivalent to a sparcstation. I was a huge linux fan and evangelized for it everywhere.

A few years later, I was acting as a sysadmin, and wanted to replace some aging DECstations with PCs running Linux. The prototype machine was great, except for how terrible NFS performance was. The kicker was xdvi would take minutes to render a page of a document. The DECstations would take seconds, even though they were ~10% as fast as the PC running Linux. I realized the problem was that Linux NFS didn't do any client side caching, and xdvi walked around byte-by-byte in the font files.

I met Linus at the '94 Boston USENIX and asked about NFS file caching. He told me he didn't care about NFS, and didn't think it would ever get fixed. The interaction was unpleasant and left a very bad taste in my mouth.

I then went to the FreeBSD BOF, where they were professional (Justin Gibbs was wearing a button down shirt and giving a power-point presentation). They assured me that FreeBSD cached NFS just like any other filesystem.

When I returned from the conference, I installed FreeBSD on the test PC and sure enough, it rendered the xdvi pages instantly.

Its amazing how that one experience shaped my life. I used and hacked on FreeBSD for years later when I worked on OS research. I helped port FreeBSD to the DEC Alpha and became a committer in the late 90s, and have contributed ever since. These days I get paid by my employer to make FreeBSD as fast as possible for our workloads, and get to do cool stuff like building what I suspect is the world's fastest web server in terms of absolute bandwidth.