Wow, very similar experience here with the email-terminal starting point, except instead of the C compiler, which was indeed a pretty awesome discovery, I discovered I could write shell scripts, just like those described by hacker-hunter Cliff Stoll.

I had been writing DOS batch files with the help of PC Magazine utils for years, and shell scripts looked absolutely amazing. From that point on I pretty much always had to know where I could go to get unix or Linux shell access...