[xtracto]

For me it was late 90s. A friend of the family bought for me Walnut Creek's FreeBSD CD set, with all the stickers and other goodies. They sent it all the way to my godforsaken small town in Mexico. As a 12 year old it was soooo cool. I remember spending hours installing (incluing configuring and compiling the kernel in an ncurses based interface). I printed the whole FreeBSD manual and my mom bound it for me.

Great times!

[protomyth]

The printed FreeBSD Handbook with the 2.5 CD-ROM was amazing at the time. An open source OS with a book that was better than some of the commercial OS offerings. We setup the colleges first mail server with that combo.

[op00to]

Would you have been able to get FreeBSD otherwise? Like, mid 90s I remember downloading Slackware from a BBS. Floppy after floppy. Was that available in your area at the time?

[xtracto]

I dont think so. BBSs were not really a thing in Mexico... particularly in a city as small as mine. Maybe in Mexico city. But long distance calls were super expensive (mom used to talk to my grandma living in another city only once a week for 30 mins).

I think I might have been able to get something in the local public university computer centre. It was the beginning of the internet (14.4 modems min to connect to the university, which was the only internet provider)

Great fun times!