Way back in 1997, I was introduced to a little 486 machine installed by a consultant that was acting as our company mail server, firewall, web and ftp server, and a bunch more things I can't remember now. It was running this amazing stuff called FreeBSD (v2.0.5 at the time) and the consultant showed me how to get around. I'd never managed to get closer to UNIX than Kernighan and Pike (gee, that's neat stuff!) or a serial port (the other guy was the 'senior' s/w engineer), so I dove in and took over, fascinated by both Perl and BSD. Bosses wanted additions to the transaction-processing website (designed by an outside company and I was cheaper), so I learned Perl CGI coding. Perl led to Expect and Tcl and a whole bunch more. Since most of my career has been embedded device programming, it was a while before I got back to Perl, but it's doing amazing things for my job rep once again!