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

On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 06:55:46AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: Unix was pretty much the first thing I used. I did regress to CPM Z80 based machine because 40-60 users on a 1Mhz (I think) VAX was crazy slow, even though it had disk and I think 4MB of ram, the 128K 4mhz z80 with floppies was faster. I wrote assembly versions of ls, cp, mv, rm, etc - assembly so that I could cram the program into a 512 byte sector (both for speed of loading as well as for small size). The aha moment for me was one of the many times I was logged into slovax (an 11/750 that had the BSD source on it) reading popen.c and got to the point where it forked a process. It blew my mind, here I am in libc and it's creating processes for me. I just didn't expect that but was struck by the thought "huh, these Unix guys don't fool around, they use the abstractions they advertise". I expected something like Windows spawn or some VMS complex thing, I sure as heck didn't expect fork and exec, shows how naive I was at the time. Fun times.