After funds became available to build my first PC in 1988 from mail order parts. My work had a few IBM PC’s around and I was allowed to make a ‘backup’ boot disk for these and one for myself. Now I had a home lab of sorts. Later came Windows 2.15 for 386 and eventually Windows 3.1 for Workgroups.
In the early 1990’s I began hearing of an operating system not Microsoft called Slackware. It was in it’s infancy, you had to download multiple disk images and write them to 3.5 inch floppy disks. This was the first (to me) free operating system based on Unix.
I play with many ‘distros’ of Linux in a Virtual Box test environment so I can experience more with out doing bare metal installs.