I would guess he's talking about the early 80s. I was in the same boat in that time period. I didn't have access to C until my senior year in college (1984-85) when we got a new Computer Science department head who was pro-Unix, and we got a Vax 11-750 with BSD Unix on it. I worked on a special project that gave me access to that machine, and there I learned Unix, vi, and C. I thought I had died and gone to heaven!