Gregory's Server@stefano I discovered the linux world in '95 : barebones X11, sparse doc (no arch or gentoo wiki, didn't even know about the handbook), internet was young. Back then, dependency-aware packages manager didn't exist, at least on linux. IIRC, Debian changed that a few years later with apt, then Mandrake (ancestor of Mageia) developed urpmi, and now you couldn't imagine a distro without this feature.
I heard of Freebsd in 2006, but unfortunetly didn't had the opportunity to use it as much.
@chimay I remember those time (I started with Linux in 1996). The main problem was the lack of documentation. When Gentoo came out, I learnt a lot of things, but the FreeBSD handbook has been my manual for Unix and Unix like systems as many things could apply to any of them.