Re: [TUHS] man-page style

It was man pages that first caught my eye, placing me on a life-long path of working with Unix and its derivatives. I was working on a project for a telephone company, converting IBM 2780 Bisync to async, and was given a manual and root access to a Xenix machine. I had cut my teeth on a Radio Shack TRS-80 and knew BASIC and Z80 machine code. The machine had BASIC, so that is where I started. I had spent an afternoon writing a hex dump program before I discovered "od". I spent the next day reading all the man pages. I was amazed with their simplicity and clarity. Having finished the man pages, I read the Unix Programmer's Manual cover to cover. I re-wrote the hex dump in C just for fun. I was sold. The remarkable simplicity of Unix, the kernel, the commands, the documentation, is a beautiful thing. And I was fortunate to have found it early in my career. It was also a time, when the manuals were concise enough to read them all in a few day's time. To put that into perspective, it took me weeks to acquire a copy of the documentation for IBM 2780 Bisync, and even then it left me with more questions. I was simply amazed to have found such an elegant system. That it came with documentation on every aspect of the system was almost to good to be true. For a young programmer starting out in the world, man pages were like gold. Jim From: "Grant Taylor via TUHS" <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org Sent: Friday, November 16, 2018 1:03:37 AM Subject: Re: [TUHS] man-page style On 11/15/2018 10:32 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote: I think man pages make a great reference. But I don't think they are a good teaching source for someone that doesn't know the material or what the components are for. -- Grant. . . . unix || die