10 Nov
2017
10 Nov
'17
8:51 p.m.
On Fri, 10 Nov 2017 12:00:15 -0600 Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Will Senn writes:
My question for you citizens of that long-ago era :), is this - what was
it like to sit down and learn unix V7 on a PDP? Not from a hardware or
ergonomics perspective, but from a human information processing
perspective. What resources did you consult in your early days and what
did the workflow look like in practical terms.
...
So, what was the process of learning unix like in the
V7 days? What were
your goto resources? More than just man and the sources? Any particular
notes, articles, posts, or books that were really helpful (I found the
article, not the book, "The Unix Programming Environment" by Kernighan
and Mashey, to be enlightening
https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/1981/04/01667315.pdf)?
I learned by trying out pretty much *every* command in /bin
and /usr/bin. I would read the man page, play with the
command, read the man page some more, and so on. I wrote toy
programs to learn about common libc functions. I tried out
pretty much every vi command to become better at editing.
Fotunately v7 was a small enough system that one could
actually learn something about every command, every device
driver, every syscall, every libc function etc.
I read the documentation bundled with v7 & BSD, and I read
unix source code as well as observed and learned from seasoned
unix hackers. But I would switch to writing (and rewriting)
code ASAP as I learn better by building something. And
debugging. There are lots of learning opportunities there!
The key is not give up until you find the root cause.
Debugging can give a more intuitive sense of how things work
as you start paying more attention to even little things.