I was living/working in the US and one of our UK colleagues had brought a tape of Linux over - A Sun DC150 tape with SLS I think...
So I bought a PC - a DX4/66 and an Ethernet card (ne2K) 280MB drive and I think 32MB of RAM. Loaded the tape onto one of the sun servers we had, NFS exported the partition, wrote a boot floppy and I think 5 more root floppys, booted the PC and did the install, initially off the floppys then via NFS.
Half an hour later I had a PC running Linux, X and fvwm and it was more usable and faster than the X windows terminals I was using on the Suns we had.
Back in the UK some months later and I switched to what was then an embryonic Debian and the rest is history...
So the first thing I did with it was marvel at just how good it was! I had my own "unix" box. How cool was that?