I was fortunate to be well supplied by government science departments with workstations of many flavours (DEC Ultrix, IBM AIX, SGI Irix, Sun 'Suntools', VMS). D

I was fortunate to be well supplied by government science departments with workstations of many flavours (DEC Ultrix, IBM AIX, SGI Irix, Sun 'Suntools', VMS). Due to these machines being setup the same way by some nice kind civil servants somewhere in England there was always a compiler on there with a few bookshelves of printed manual not far away. I grew up with that expectation. Imagine my shock when I properly made it into the real world and realised that all of these machines were useless without their government-special software suites. This I did not entirely mind at the time as this kept the barriers to entry up meaning that my skills and experience were of value, purely because they were gleaned from the privilege of having access to software and hardware beyond the affordable. Nowadays I only use free open source software and this is how I like it. The idea of having to go through the hassle of licensing software and typing codes carefully into a screen does not do it for me. I am glad I don't have 2-3 hardware dongles on the printer port(!) of my Chromebook. Instead I have Ubuntu. Needless to say I don't compile often, if at all, however, to not have that feature would be a problem for me.