Well, when I was 23 I was working at Bell Labs, and some of my friends on Usenet were talking about this new idea of 'cell phones' (Ref the Cellular Mobile Radiotelephone System patent that was issued in Aug 1983).

I did most of my work those days on a PDP-11 running Unix System III which had a 300 baud connection out to Usenet.

Anyway, learn Unix, it is well worth it. Start off by getting OpenSSH installed on your phone, then ssh into your phone from whatever other computers you might have around.

I'd encourage you to spend time with Python, GTK+ and sqlite3 as good starting points for really getting your hands dirty with the phone.