In 1999, I was a new staff member at our work and everyone was using Windows. The company however bought an IBM AIX RISC 5000 machine that was sitting idle because nobody knew how to use it. They asked me to play with it. I read the manual and worked my way. That was my first encounter with UNIX. Around that time Linux was picking up. My experience with AIX made it easy for me to mess with Linux a couple years later.