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@minnie.tuhs.org>
To: tuhs@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:
> The Unix manpage format is the epitome of perfection; they tell you
> everything you need to know, and in the right order. Frequently I
> cannot recall a particular flag (but I know what it does), and it's
> right there at the start.
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