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" <velocityboy@gmail.com>
To: "Warren Toomey" <wkt@tuhs.org>
Cc: "The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs@tuhs.org>
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@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.