Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

On 2019-10-10 15:55, Warren Toomey wrote: I'm a bit younger, first started playing with Unix systems in 1992, a Sun something running SunOS 4.1.something while in collage. I just kinda assumed that this remote system I was accessing over a dial-up connection some some big-iron box, I mean, it had dozens of people logged into it at a time! Of course it was something bigger than the PC I had at home. When I first saw a Sun pizza-box, and realized it was the same class system I'd been logging into remotely, I was impressed, but was still sure it was some magic that made it way more special than the PC stuff I was used to. I later learned about Linux and installed it on a 486DX-50 that had been slated to be a backup Novell box at my job. This was a system that did a decent job at being a Novel server, its clone had ~45 systems attached to it in the student lab, was a file/print server, etc. I knew that it was a beefy box for Windows (3.1, at the time), but with Linux... With Linux, I had X11 on the console, could be playing Doom, browse thew eb with Mosaic, etc, while a dozen+ CS students were logged in from the Wyse terminals in the next building, and it kept chugging along. I started out on home-PCs of the era: Commodore 64, Apple II, various CP/M systems, TI 99/4A, and of course MS/PC-DOS systems. Unix showed me what a computer could really do. I don't really remember being impressed with pipes, for some reason, they just made sense to me. For me, the first time someone showed me xargs, that was cool. It was my introduction to command-line scripting. -- Michael Parson Pflugerville, TX KF5LGQ