Ok, so I am not quite a novice, though I may appear so compared to some on here.
I was introduced to UNIX and the Internet back when I was a student at the Bronx High School of Science (1993). The school network used IBM X stations which booted off of a network AIX. Thinking back I wonder how many people remember gopher, veronica and archie...
At college, where the school's science labs used Digital OSF and VAX systems, I installed Red Hat Linux (version 5 at the time?)...