I got my start with Unix on a SPARCstation while interning at British Telecom.  I used it to build a website (using C++ and Oracle for the backend - must have been in 1993 or 1994, when the web was still fairly uncommon outside of big companies and academia).<p>I clearly remember coming home from work and raving to axod about how rad Sun was because they did some fairly high-level graphics operations in <i>hardware</i> (at the time he was doing a lot of VGA programming in x86 assembler, so I think this impressed him).