[emmelaich]

It was a major motivation for me to get into Linux when it started.

Until then I couldn't afford Lattice C for the Amiga or whatever was available for MS-DOS. (as a poor student)

[pjmlp]

Ironically it was Sun that triggered the GCC adoption, by splitting Solaris into user and developer editions, quickly followed by other UNIX vendors.

Until then, very few cared GCC existed in first place.