Thanks for the warm welcome!

For me, it was uucp of all things. I needed to set up a way of copying mailboxes from one place to another over a modem-to-modem connection. Unix allowed me to do it with a simple script and minimal overhead.

When I realised that I also had a C compiler built in then....

On Thu, 10 Oct 2019 at 21:56, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote:

All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome.
A reminder that we're here to discuss Unix Heritage, so I'll nudge you
if the conversation goes a bit off-topic.

So I'll kick off another thread. What was your "ahah" moment when you
first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd
previously used?

Mine was: Oh, I can:
+ write a simple script
+ to edit a file on the fly
+ with no temporary files (a la pipes)
+ AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me!

I was using TOPS-20 beforehand.

Cheers, Warren