I was in a similar situation; though I'm roughly a decade younger. I grew up in the BBS era, and experienced the internet first as gopher and ftp access (archie

I was in a similar situation; though I'm roughly a decade younger. I grew up in the BBS era, and experienced the internet first as gopher and ftp access (archie!) through the local schoolsnet. I bought "Using Linux" by Sams in 1995 solely to get access to GCC, because a C compiler was extremely difficult to come by. And yet, within a year they became commonly available, for DOS and Windows even, thanks to DJGPP. The local schoolsnet added SLIP support, and we could access Delorie's website. While Microsoft and Borland were still charging an arm and a leg, and GNU couldn't be bothered to support non-free systems, it was Delorie who created that bridge to common users and opened the world of C programming to us.