I had a very similar journey. For me, I got hooked on computers when my mom (a programmer at a defense contractor) would take me in to work when she didn't have a sitter. I got to hang out in the computer room and play adventure on the minicomputers they had in the late 70s. I had the typical Apple II experience many of us had in the early 80s. I learned to type by typing in those games from Byte (and how to debug by finding my typos), eventually writing my own games and learning 6502 assembly.
Flash forward to university and my first Unix account on an always-melting-down sparc server. There were dozens of DEC VT220 terminals in our public lab at UB in 1989, but only a few Xterminals which were highly coveted. My friends and I jumped at the chance to use them. Most of us eventually got on-campus jobs or internships with the goal of getting unfettered access to Sun or DECstation workstations. I STILL use some of the same keyboard shortcuts from my 1990 .twmrc, and my .cshrc, .Xdefaults and .emacs files have all just evolved from then (and yes, I still use tcsh).
The first time I installed Linux was from a stack of 3.5" floppies sometime in 1993 when I was a grad student at a different school. I was a huge Linux fan.
A year later, I met Linus at the '94 Linux BOF at the USENIX in Boston. At the time, I was trying to convince our dept to buy PCs rather than Suns or DECs to replace some wheezing grad student workstations. However, I ran into a problem where we used LaTeX, and it kept its fonts on a central NFS server (these were the days when disk space was precious, there were no package managers, and everything was installed by hand --- so installing stuff to NFS was very common). The 12MHz Mips R2000 DECstation 2100s we had (our slowest machines) would render a page of text in a second or two using xdvi. However, a test Linux machine (which was a blazingly fast 66MHz 486) would take 10x as long. I eventually figured out that this was because Linux NFS did not do any file caching at the time, and xdvi was seeking around byte by byte in the font files.
I was very excited to meet Linus, and was really looking forward to the USENIX BOF. So when I asked Linus about NFS file caching, he blew me off in what I now know is a typical Linus like fashion, and said he didn't care about NFS. So I went to the very friendly and welcoming FreeBSD BOF, found out that NFS works, and never looked back.