11 Oct
2019
11 Oct
'19
10:44 p.m.
On 10/10/19 1:55 PM, Warren Toomey 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?
For me it happened in highschool - 1992/1993. I had been playing around
with my i386 at home which had a modem and i used to dial into my local
library and eventually bbs's and stuff. then my school offered a class
on Earth Systems Science which was partly funded and sponsored by NASA
which was awesome by itself, but for me the real turning point was our
computer lab had an SGI indigo workstation. everything about it blew my
mind, i have very clear memories of learning how to download satalite
data via ftp, use tar to expand the data then visualize it. i also
remember bugging one of the smarter guys in the class how he changed his
prompt to look so cool :^)
this workstation also had mosaic and we were all given email addresses
(domain gaia.circles.org, even had a webpage hosted there!).
so for me - this Unix aha! moment was very closely mixed with an
Internet aha! moment when i discovered how much more info was available
to me compared to my local suburban library :)
-pete
--
Pete Wright
pete(a)nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA