[ksangeelee]

The first Linux distribution I remember using was Slackware on floppy disks, at a time when building a kernel was pretty much necessary to get a working system. A great learning experience, all in all.

However, the point I'd like to make is that it was clear back then just how much was contributed directly by the GNU project, and also how favored GNU's GPL was by developers who wanted to contribute their work.

GNU really did seem like it was everything that made the Linux kernel act and feel like a Unix system, though I had no proper appreciation of that at the time.