My first "Aha moment" was when I (accidentally) discovered job control.
Being able to hit ctrl-Z while editing something, do some things, type "fg"
and be back where I left off was just amazing. None of the "unix emulation"
products on top of dos/windows could do that (at least at the time, the
ones available to me. IIRC cygwin these days has job control).

Then I bought O'Reilly's "Unix Power Tools" book (which I recommend to
anyone. Great book). The next epiphany was the discovery of `` (backticks)
and xargs. Command line arguments and pipes could be transformed into each
other. Just wow. Then I discovered vi and permanently lost the ability to
be happy with other operating systems.


On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 7:21 PM Lawrence Stewart <stewart@serissa.com>
wrote:

> I first encountered Unix as v6 on an 11/34 at Stanford Information Systems
> Lab.  I read all the man pages and then the Lions book turned up and then
> we had need of some new device drivers, and then we needed to get hooked up
> to the Arpanet,… and it took off from there.
>
> -Larry
>
>