Manual small enough to pick up. Man pages for each program. IO simple and made sense. -jsq

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

I've been watching this thread and thinking to myself, what was my personal aha moment?

I guess it came to me in 1993 when I downloaded Patrick Volkerding's magnificent 11 floppy labor of love via my amazingly fast 300 baud modem attached to the University of Texas at Arlington's VMS system with a gateway to the internet. After many weeks of trying, I eventually got Slackware downloaded and burned to floppies. After booting up and after another couple of weeks of configuration frustration, I was able to run X on my machine and while it would be another decade before I switched over permanently, I never got over how much more powerful *nix was than anything I'd been exposed to and way more interesting than Windows 3 which was prevalent at the time. I was a C programmer back then and to have access to a system that was predicated on the language was awesome.

Then In 2005, I bought a powerbook with my bonus, I learned you could have your cake (beautiful gui - thank you Next) and eat it too (thank you FreeBSD) and after that you couldn't pay me enough to ever switch back to windows :).

Then, In 2019, I downloaded Mint 19.2 Tina Cinnamon 64 bit edition to my $300 Lenovo Thinkpad T430, installed zfsutils and marveled at how far linux has come.

Oh, wait! Last week, I...

But seriously, I am constantly surprised at how Unix underpins so much of my computing happiness. Gone are the doldrums of blue screens, stoopid command lines, even stoopider menus, microsoft bob's, and paper clip wizards,. Every time I move a mouse in the classroom and windows shows up, I shudder. Then I calmly connect my hdmi cable from my laptop to the projector, breathe a sigh of relief, and fire up my Mac/Linux/FreeBSD/Unix v6/v7/v0 environment and show my students what it means to be free :).

OK, so technically speaking these aren't exactly Unix recollections, but they are certainly dependent on their Unix forebears and wouldn't exist without that heritage.

Thank you Unix pioneers for making such a fun (something new to learn every day) system. Oh, and thanks for the file metaphor, and thanks for vi, best editor ever, and for C, and and and...

Thanks,

Will

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