On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 4:56 PM Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> 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?

Mine was: Oh, I can:
+ write a simple script
+ to edit a file on the fly
+ with no temporary files (a la pipes)
+ AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me!

I was using TOPS-20 beforehand.

Cheers, Warren

As an undergrad in the 80's. Before college most of my experience had been on various flavors of BASIC, with the one exception being a summer spent at a science camp where I did Pascal on an Apple ][ and other programming assignments on VMS.

My college had a big schism between the computer services department that serviced the whole school -- they ran an IBM 4341 with VM/SP -- and the actual computer science department that ran UNIX on a VAX-11/780. Undergrad classes were mostly on the mainframe and grad students used the VAX. I learned C on the mainframe but was able to talk my way into a UNIX account and started seeing how much more elegant things were.