16 Oct
2019
16 Oct
'19
7:29 p.m.
On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 02:45:37PM -0700, Steve Johnson wrote:
My Aha, Unix! moment was the Unix man pages, especially that they had
a section for BUGS. The very reality of it attracted me. As Gloria
Steinem said, "Something doesn't have to be perfect to be
wonderful!" I notice that on Linux the older man pages still have
BUG sections, but the newer ones don't. Telling. Even more
telling is that 'man python' gives you a lot of information, but at
the end where the Bugs section used to be is a section labled
"LICENSING"...
I did have the opportunity in the early years to demonstrate Unix to
several dozen people, mostly users of the (IBM) mainframe computers
and the GE/Honeywell Time Sharing System. The sequence that
initiated gasps, confusion, and ultimately joy was:
% echo hello joe > hijoe
% cat hijoe
hello joe
Coming from a Multics background, my first view of Unix (sort of
v7 ported to a Bull Mini6) was more like a rant: "cwd" on Multics
has been renamed to a more cryptic "cd" on Unix, these guys have
done worse!
The Aha! came when I realized that redirections were so simple...
Pierre