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

Warren Toomey wrote in <20191010205546.GA29154(a)minnie.tuhs.org>: |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: I get the feeling somebody's watching me! (However: #?0|kent:$ prt-get info xeyes Package 'xeyes' not found #?255|kent:$ prt-get dsearch xeye No matching packages found #?255|kent:$ prt-get fsearch xeye #?255|kent:$) | + write a simple script Perl with full set of manual pages available! (Only as single page HTML before.) | + to edit a file on the fly That was really hard, coming from Notepad plus or what its name was. Luckily there was MidnightCommander as a NortonCommander clone, otherwise i would likely have been bogged down. xedit no, xemacs no. There was a graphical editor thing, i think it used Motif, but i have forgotten. Had syntax highlighting, but had no tabs if i recall correctly. It was a long way to get myself going with emacs, but finally, after a year or two, came to vim. The window managers were really hard to get right, i grabbed a super-cheap SuSE debug CD on 1999-01-11, it used fvwm2. Focus follows mouse and much more i could not deal with. I booted Windows for working purposes until first of May 1999, when i finally switched over to fulltime Linux. (I ended up using icewm after Enlightenment (cool but to slow) and WindowMaker did not make it. Until i discovered ahwm, which then was it. Only recently i switched to cwm.) | + with no temporary files (a la pipes) That did bother you. I am superficial. And i came in via 4DOS. And as a Basic, .BAT and perl "programmer". | + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me! Discovery of shebang was a tremendous moment. And anything around that. Discovery of manuals, for example the GNU C library manual! Ah, it soon was discovery of the entire basic UNIX tool set, that dispersed set of tools acting together for a greater whole! That was really, really great. |I was using TOPS-20 beforehand. C64/GEOS, Win 3.1/DOS, Windows95/4DOS. |Cheers, Warren --End of <20191010205546.GA29154(a)minnie.tuhs.org> --steffen | |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear, |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off |(By Robert Gernhardt)