The first Unix system I could ever get my hand on by downloading or buying disks was Linux. I think this is the reason for the early relative popularity of Lin

The first Unix system I could ever get my hand on by downloading or buying disks was Linux. I think this is the reason for the early relative popularity of Linux compared to BSD. We have to remember that in the early 90ies, most people did not have internet at home or at least not broadband internet. I got my first Linux CD-ROM in 1993 and started using Linux in 1994, because a lot of computer magazines came with Slackware Linux. It was also relatively easy to get Linux distributions cheaply on CD-ROMs, e.g. through the InfoMagic Linux Developer's Resource. I only discovered FreeBSD probably through some Linux documentation and for me the only way to get it was to buy a relatively expensive FreeBSD CD set from Walnut Creek (remember, no broadband internet). When I finally got a FreeBSD set in 1996, I was amazed by its consistency, documentation, and quality. But by then, Linux already had all the attention. Why magazines shipped Linux? I don't know. Maybe some were afraid to ship BSD because of the AT&T lawsuit. But I think Linux was also the better story: 'a student hacker somewhere in Finland writes a kernel and takes over the world/is going to break down the Microsoft empire'.