I think I'm a little younger than you as well, but my first unix was Red Hat Linux 7. It came on a CD and was so buggy[0] I gave up on it after 6 months. I wouldn't touch another unix until my sophomore year at college, when a roommate convinced me to try Gentoo. That worked for two years before I got fed up with it (I wiped out my /etc one time too many). Then I bought a TiBook from same said roommate and haven't looked back since.
Wow yes, I think with Redhat 7 you still had to make your own kernel source code, which would generally take the better part of an afternoon. Wow great slashdot reference!
[0]: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/00/10/02/2046212/red-hat-lin...