When I was teaching myself to program, I had a night job in a warehouse. It so happened that the inventory software was on a UNIX server, and we accessed it through a terminal emulator from our windows computer. I discovered one day that I could exit the inventory software and end up with a shell prompt, and that the server had Perl available.

My computer books convinced me that emacs was the better editor, but it wasn’t installed on the server. vi was. So I learned vi and Perl on my lunch breaks.