In the early 90's a startup I joined changed direction and I had to learn DEC Unix on the Alpha's for the hardward/software products we made. Really nice OS and hardware. The great thing is I learned enough to get started on a Linux server on my own. I wanted some kind of file and printer server, so, after that ride, sometime in 1999 I bought a very used PC from my first consulting customer for $25 (they were unloading a lot of hardware). I added a new big harddrive (10G!). Naturally (as it was free and I sort of knew Unix enough) I installed Red Hat and went from there. For the first few years I upgraded until RH7, then ran that version until last fall when a board failure occurred. So that little box ran flawlessly for 10 years!