A few odd couple short of 20 years ago, but nevertheless, Linux was a new wonder to me. Red Hat CDs came packaged with issues of a computer magazine. This was in India. 7 KB/sec was fast, and it lasted a burst or two per day. Was absolutely new to programing. Wrote a p2p service for sharing rpm packages, because downloading them from upstream was so slow. Wrote it in TCL, it went nowhere. But a few snippets of that code found its way into the tcl library.

Laser printers were a frightfully expensive piece of equipment and wasting toner bothered me. So went through ghostscript code to realize for the first time how beautiful code can truly be. Patched a part of the driver to handle economy mode.

Had it not been for FSF and open-source, I would perhaps have never learned programming. I did not major in CS, but for those who did, without FSF it would have been unaffordable.