I was lucky that my mother's employer had the money and the good sense to afford a DEC PDP-11 when those old Unix dorm refrigerators cost a hundred grand before they were deprecated and replaced by linux boxes in slow motion.
That old Unix box, plus my mother's decades-ahead-of-its-time WFH arrangement, which included an IBM PC XT that would run DOS and later Windows, was the bedrock of my education. I'd borrow that PC in the evenings and weekends to hack and learn on DR-DOS and the like.
That old DEC would jump-start my career in computer science, along with my trusty Atari ST.
The Atari ST, in particular, was just a poor man's Macintosh at the time, and it ran much of the same software from programming languages to MIDI.
My open source work began around Y2K, most likely on a plane between Boston, Seattle, and Pittsburgh. Twenty years later, the documentation in section 6.1 on page 19 still mentions my boilerplate servlet as if that were innovation.