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

Thanks Jim. Your story about BASIC and C reminded me of another "aha" moment. My first programming job involving UNIX in the early 1980's was to send data to an IBM mainframe via 2780/3780 binary synchronous communications (BSC). I started writing a HEX dump utility using BASIC. I wasn't happy with the execution speed and started reading man pages. I discovered C. Having done some work with assembly, I immediately recognized the similarity and function as a "portable assembler". By that time, UNIX had been ported to at least a dozen different architectures. I was sold on the design, utility, and "openness" of the documentation, and have been working with nearly every flavor of *NIX ever since. Cheers, Jim From: "Jim Geist" &lt;velocityboy(a)gmail.com&gt; To: "Warren Toomey" &lt;wkt(a)tuhs.org&gt; Cc: "The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" &lt;tuhs(a)tuhs.org&gt; Sent: Friday, October 11, 2019 1:13:37 PM Subject: Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 4:56 PM Warren Toomey < wkt(a)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 As an undergrad in the 80's. Before college most of my experience had been on various flavors of BASIC, with the one exception being a summer spent at a science camp where I did Pascal on an Apple ][ and other programming assignments on VMS. My college had a big schism between the computer services department that serviced the whole school -- they ran an IBM 4341 with VM/SP -- and the actual computer science department that ran UNIX on a VAX-11/780. Undergrad classes were mostly on the mainframe and grad students used the VAX. I learned C on the mainframe but was able to talk my way into a UNIX account and started seeing how much more elegant things were.