I learned Perl 4 on an Atari ST and Perl 5 on a Windows PC, all without having seen or touched a Unix machine. Now that I have a Linux server amongst the computers in my network, I can't say that knowing (some) Unix/Linux helps me in any way to better understand Perl. I feel it is rather the other way around: knowing Perl helped me to get into *nix spirit of things.
CountZero
"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law