I went down a similar path.

I was already tainted by starting on 8 an 16 bit home computers, the magic of Amiga and OS/2, before getting into UNIX via Xenix.

The wonderful dungeon of the university library did the rest, showing me all the alternative universe.

It also helped my university was keen into teaching the ways of Smalltalk, Lisp, ML, Prolog, Oberon, in addition to classical UNIX lectures.

I was really lucky in that regard.