I was one of those people downloading 386BSD to floppy disks in my university computer lab in '91 or so. The prospect of running a "real" Unix on my PC hardware was really a way out of the prospect of saving up all my pennies for a SunOS workstation (north of 4kUSD at the time!). Linux (0.99?) was released around these times and took off way faster for all the reasons outlined by responses in this thread. It seems like Linux was inevitable with or without 386BSD and its descendants.
Regardless, for me personally, I'll consider Jolitz's work seminal in my own thought and evolution when I was stuck in the mindset that only options were the big old klunky PDP 11/780's or the pricey SGI/Sun workstations that surrounded me in the same lab. He was part of that revolution of folks breaking those molds for that, thanks you Bill Jolitz.
Regardless, for me personally, I'll consider Jolitz's work seminal in my own thought and evolution when I was stuck in the mindset that only options were the big old klunky PDP 11/780's or the pricey SGI/Sun workstations that surrounded me in the same lab. He was part of that revolution of folks breaking those molds for that, thanks you Bill Jolitz.