Interview with Andrew Tanenbaum (LinuxFr.org)

There was a point, very early on in the 1990's, when InfoMagic offered both FreeBSD and Linux; in fact, BSD came with a very nice book. I bought a copy, and to my dismay I found out it wouldn't work with my computer because it had a "broken" IDE card. When I wrote back about it, the BSD folks said just return the software, they didn't have time to fix it, and I was just a mere desktop user, and they would rather deal with big servers and SCSI hard drives and so on. So, I sent off for a copy of Slackware, it installed flawlessly (or--much more perfectly than BSD....) and the rest is history.

Ironically, a couple years later I downloaded a later version of FreeBSD and successfully installed it on the same computer with the same hardware. Unfortunately, however, I had already invested lots of time and energy and money into O'Reilly's books on Linux, so it was too late.