No longer do you need access to a university or government lab to get your hands on Unix. Nor do you have to scour obscure corners of university libraries to get your hands on some wizard manual that finally makes sense of some bit of it for you.
It's funny, I can still remember a conversation I had it about 1995 with a colleague, we were certain that with this new Linux thing, *BSD at so on, now that everyone could get their own Unix to play with, the specialized sysadmin and the dedicated C programmer were totally obsolete, everyone would have these skills. This was around the time remember that a "real" workstation would cost 20 grand at least, and the compiler would cost as much again...
That obviously didn't happen, 20 years later, so I think we can reasonably conclude that "access to systems" was never actually the problem.
It's funny, I can still remember a conversation I had it about 1995 with a colleague, we were certain that with this new Linux thing, *BSD at so on, now that everyone could get their own Unix to play with, the specialized sysadmin and the dedicated C programmer were totally obsolete, everyone would have these skills. This was around the time remember that a "real" workstation would cost 20 grand at least, and the compiler would cost as much again...
That obviously didn't happen, 20 years later, so I think we can reasonably conclude that "access to systems" was never actually the problem.