My impression, as someone who had a used Sun 3/50 in the early 90s, who later used Linux a lot, and who used various Unix workstations (IBM, Sun, Next, SGI, HP)

My impression, as someone who had a used Sun 3/50 in the early 90s, who later used Linux a lot, and who used various Unix workstations (IBM, Sun, Next, SGI, HP) in college: For the bulk of Unix user/developers, the big thing was that GCC reintroduced the idea that you should be able to get free dev tools for your Unix OS, during a time when some vendors had decided that you should pay more to get the dev tools in addition to the base OS.