This is actually how I was introduced to FreeBSD as well. I was a high school student in 2004 who had a hand-me-down PC that one of my high school teachers gave me. It had a 475MHz AMD K6-2 processor, 64MB RAM, and a 8GB hard drive that was running Windows 98. I learned about Linux in the spring of 2004, and I had Zipslack, which was a version of Slackware Linux that ran on top of DOS. I wanted to try Gentoo, but I had dial-up at home. At least Zipslack was small enough to make the download via dial-up bearable.
During the summer of 2004 I took an introductory computer science course at Sacramento City College. The professor was a big fan of FreeBSD. He convinced me to try it instead of Gentoo, and he gave me some CDs that he burned containing FreeBSD and plenty of FOSS software. I ended up installing FreeBSD on my PC, and I fell in love with it. It was my daily-driver OS until the summer of 2006, when I was able to use some of my internship earnings to purchase a MacBook, my first brand-new computer and my first modern Mac. I still use FreeBSD whenever I need a Unix and when I don’t need to use Linux-specific software.
During the summer of 2004 I took an introductory computer science course at Sacramento City College. The professor was a big fan of FreeBSD. He convinced me to try it instead of Gentoo, and he gave me some CDs that he burned containing FreeBSD and plenty of FOSS software. I ended up installing FreeBSD on my PC, and I fell in love with it. It was my daily-driver OS until the summer of 2006, when I was able to use some of my internship earnings to purchase a MacBook, my first brand-new computer and my first modern Mac. I still use FreeBSD whenever I need a Unix and when I don’t need to use Linux-specific software.