Linux

Probably around the same time I managed to find a used 386 for sale cheaply, and I bought it. I could play some of the early greats such as Dune 2, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, while others were playing CD ROM games such as Red Alert.

But I didn't care because I was still having fun, and lack of too many distractions allowed me to dive deeply into the fundamentals. When they moved on to the next cool game, I taught myself turbo Pascal and played with the serial ports and an old AT modem.

A few years later I got myself a 166MHz (MMX!) and got properly online (IRC, ICQ, etc) along with the rest and they had a hard time understanding how I was immediately so much better at understanding "their" stuff from the start than they ever would be.