Exposure to Computer Modern primarily via PDFs in the late 1990s-early 2000s was the reason I became interested in learning what produced such documents in the

Exposure to Computer Modern primarily via PDFs in the late 1990s-early 2000s was the reason I became interested in learning what produced such documents in the first place; I don't remember how, but it wasn't hard to learn about TeX after that. The outstanding quality of Computer Modern even on the low-res screens of those days is what appealed to me (to be fair, TeX's ability to produce professional-quality kerning, hyphenation, line density, et al, also contributed). I fell in love with it even before I knew what TeX was.