Bakul Shah:
Being an OS student I had read "The Unix Timesharing System" paper by
Ritchie and Thompson and had wanted to use Unix years before I actually
had the chance. I don't remember an "Aha!" moment but I took to it like
a duck to water. Most everything felt just so comfortable and right.
It was very much as I had imagined it to be.
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That's more or less what it was like to me. Not so much
an aha! moment, more just a feeling of coming home. It
took a while to understand the different way things worked
in UNIX (I had previously used TOPS-10 for several years)
but as it all sank in it felt more and more right.
C felt the same way. It took me a while to grok the pointer
syntax (I had done a lot of MACRO-10 programming so I certainly
understood the concept, just not how it fit into the higher-
level language), but things like the three-clause condition
in for so that all control for a loop could be in one place
were just magically right.
I don't think I read the CACM paper before I touched UNIX,
but I had read both editions of Software Tools, so my brain
was perhaps pre-seeded with some of the ideas.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON