Although I used SunOS, Linux, and to a lesser extent FreeBSD a bit in the late 90s, it wasn't until '99 that I really got into Linux and other flavors of UNIX like AIX (while working at IBM). Compared to what I'm familiar with, A/UX is amazingly simple. You can really see how the entire UNIX ecosystem was still in flux in the late 80s. ANSI C wasn't even standardized yet. Adding bash, gcc, and less has made A/UX much more usable for me. I can't believe how much tab completion makes life easier!
Also, I'm really glad that I ran Gentoo Linux and FreeBSD for some many years and really took the time to learn how UNIX-like operating systems work from the ground up. It demystified a lot of things and has made this experiment much easier.