In 2000, the Utah state high school programming contest was run in a Solaris lab at the University of Utah. That was my first exposure to unix and emacs. I thought it was so different and one of the students recommended that I check out linux because I could run it at home. I bought a book with a copy of Corel linux the next day (mostly because I wanted to use Word Perfect with it to write papers) and have been using linux in some form ever since.

Where you see coincidence, I see synchronicity. Hail Eris!