14 Oct
2019
14 Oct
'19
8:32 a.m.
My first "Aha moment" was when I (accidentally) discovered job control.
Being able to hit ctrl-Z while editing something, do some things, type "fg"
and be back where I left off was just amazing. None of the "unix emulation"
products on top of dos/windows could do that (at least at the time, the
ones available to me. IIRC cygwin these days has job control).
Then I bought O'Reilly's "Unix Power Tools" book (which I recommend
to
anyone. Great book). The next epiphany was the discovery of `` (backticks)
and xargs. Command line arguments and pipes could be transformed into each
other. Just wow. Then I discovered vi and permanently lost the ability to
be happy with other operating systems.
On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 7:21 PM Lawrence Stewart <stewart(a)serissa.com>
wrote:
I first encountered Unix as v6 on an 11/34 at Stanford
Information Systems
Lab. I read all the man pages and then the Lions book turned up and then
we had need of some new device drivers, and then we needed to get hooked up
to the Arpanet,… and it took off from there.
-Larry