[TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980

[TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Will Senn

    > what was it like to sit down and learn unix V7 on a PDP? ... What
    > resources did you consult in your early days

Well, I started by reading through the UPM (the 8-section thing, with commands
in I, system calls in II, etc). I also read a lot of Unix documentation which
came as larger documents (e.g the Unix Intro, C Tutorial and spec, etc).

I should point out that back then, this was a feasible task. Most man pages
were really _a_ page, and often a short one. By the end of my time on the PWB1
system, there were about 300 commands in /bin (which includes sections II, VI
and VIII), but a good chunk (I'd say probably 50 or more) were ones we'd
written. So there were not that many to start with (section II was maybe 3/4"
of paper), and you could read the UPM in a couple of hours. (I read through it
more than once; you'd get more retained, mentally, on each pass.)

There were no Unix people at all in the group at MIT which I joined, so I
couldn't ask around; there were a bunch in another group on the floor below,
although I didn't use them much - mostly it was RTFM.

Mailing lists? Books? Fuhgeddaboutit!

My next step in learning the kernel was to start reading the sources. (I
didn't have access to Lyons.) I did an 'cref' of the entire system, and
transferred the results to a large piece of paper, so I could see who was
calling who in the kernel.


    > What were your goto resources? More than just man and the sources?

That's all there was!

I should point out that reading the sources to command 'x' taught you more
than just how 'x' worked - you saw how people interacted with the kernel, what
it could do, etc, etc.

	Noel

[TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980

[Clem Cole]

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On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 1:32 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > From: Will Senn
>
>     > what was it like to sit down and learn unix V7 on a PDP? ... What
>     > resources did you consult in your early days
>
> Well, I started by reading through the UPM (the 8-section thing, with
> commands
> in I, system calls in II, etc). I also read a lot of Unix documentation
> which
> came as larger documents (e.g the Unix Intro, C Tutorial and spec, etc).
>
​Exactly -- BTW the printed ​binders that Larry mentions were a few years
away.   Brian Redman of Whippany (the 'ber' of honey-dan-ber UUCP), got
them printed in the early 1980s.




>
> I should point out that back then, this was a feasible task.

​Agreed...​



> Most man pages
> were really _a_ page, and often a short one. By the end of my time on the
> PWB1
> system, there were about 300 commands in /bin (which includes sections II,
> VI
> and VIII), but a good chunk (I'd say probably 50 or more) were ones we'd
> written. So there were not that many to start with (section II was maybe
> 3/4"
> of paper), and you could read the UPM in a couple of hours. (I read
> through it
> more than once; you'd get more retained, mentally, on each pass.)
>
​Yup, I'm not sure how many times I read through UPM, but it was a few
times.

What was amazing to me, was compared to say TOPS or even RSTS it seemed
like I could actually understand the whole thing.​




>
> There were no Unix people at all in the group at MIT which I joined, so I
> couldn't ask around; there were a bunch in another group on the floor
> below,
> although I didn't use them much - mostly it was RTFM.
>
​It was very much a learn as you go.  Ted Kowalski would show up a little
later and start to explain/argue about things that I had confused./wrong.
But my first attempts were pretty lonely.




>
> Mailing lists? Books? Fuhgeddaboutit!
>
​:-)​



>
> My next step in learning the kernel was to start reading the sources.

​ditto...​



> (I
> ​ ​
> didn't have access to Lyons.)

​I got access to Lyons after Ted showed up.   I was so impressed ;-)​



> I did an 'cref' of the entire system, and
> transferred the results to a large piece of paper, so I could see who was
> calling who in the kernel.
>
​Great mind thinks a like.   Although I had to transfer some of the stuff
to the PDP-10​ I had 'tools' there and was still learning the UNIX ones.
I did not understand grep at first. I remember the moment of enlightenment
the first time, I understood what I could do with it.
Seriously, find and grep were the two new tools that changed the way I
started to think about computers.  I had nothing like them on the 10's.



>
>
>     > What were your goto resources? More than just man and the sources?
>
> That's all there was!
>
> I should point out that reading the sources to command 'x' taught you more
> than just how 'x' worked - you saw how people interacted with the kernel,
> what
> it could do, etc, etc.

​Yeah, same here.  I spent a lot of time staring at Kernel and Application
code.​
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[TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980

[Dave Horsfall]

I guess I was lucky; I started with V5 as a graduate at the University of 
NSW in 1974 or so; we had close ties with Sydney University etc, had a 
user group (AUUG), developed our own network (ACSnet)...

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980

[Will Senn]

Hi,

Everyone on the list is well aware that running V7 in a modern simulator 
like SIMH is not a period realistic environment and some of the 
"problems" facing the novice enthusiast are considerably different from 
those of the era (my terminal is orders of magnitude faster and my 
"tape" is a file on a disk). However, many of the challenges facing 
someone in 1980, remain for the enthusiast, such as how to run various 
commands successfully and how devices interoperate with unix. Of course, 
we have do resources and some overlapping experience to draw on - 
duckduckgo (googleish), tuhs member experience, and exposure to modern 
derivatives like linux, macos, bsd, etc. We also have documentation of 
the system in the form of the Programmer's Guide - as pdfs and to some 
degree as man pages on the system (haven't found volume 2 documentation 
on the instance).

My question for you citizens of that long-ago era :), is this - what was 
it like to sit down and learn unix V7 on a PDP? Not from a hardware or 
ergonomics perspective, but from a human information processing 
perspective. What resources did you consult in your early days and what 
did the workflow look like in practical terms.

As an example - today, when I want to know how to accomplish a task in 
modern unix, I:

 1. Search my own experience and knowledge. If I know the answer, duh, I
    know it.
 2. Decide if I have enough information about the task to guess at the
    requisite commands. If I do, then man command is my friend. If not,
    I try man -k task or apropos task where task is a one word summary
    of what I'm trying to accomplish.
 3. If that fails, then I search for the task online and try what other
    folks have done in similar circumstances.
 4. If that fails, then I look for an OS specific help list
    (linux-mint-help, freebsd forums, etc), do another search there, and
    post a question.
 5. If that fails, or takes a while, and I know someone with enough
    knowledge to help, I ask them.
 6. I find and scan relevant literature or books on the subject for
    something related.

Repeat as needed.

Programming requires some additional steps:

 1. look at source files including headers and code.
 2. look at library dependencies
 3. ask on dev lists

but otherwise, is similar.

In V7, it's trickier because apropos doesn't exist, or the functional 
equivalent man -k, for that matter and books are hard to find (most deal 
with System V or BSD. I do find the command 'find /usr/man -name "*" -a 
-print | grep task' to be useful in finding man pages, but it's not as 
general as apropos.

So, what was the process of learning unix like in the V7 days? What were 
your goto resources? More than just man and the sources? Any particular 
notes, articles, posts, or books that were really helpful (I found the 
article, not the book, "The Unix Programming Environment" by Kernighan 
and Mashey, to be enlightening 
https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/1981/04/01667315.pdf)?

Regards,

Will

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[TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 12:00:15PM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
> My question for you citizens of that long-ago era :), is this - what was it
> like to sit down and learn unix V7 on a PDP? Not from a hardware or
> ergonomics perspective, but from a human information processing perspective.
> What resources did you consult in your early days and what did the workflow
> look like in practical terms.

I learned on the VAX, did some PDP-11 assembly but I dunno if I ever 
ran on one.  Definitely spent a lot of time on 11/750, 11/780 and the 8600.

The hardest part, for me, was learning command names.  Where is dir?
Oh, it's ls.  Etc.

I believe the 4BSD manuals (those ones with red/yellow/green plastic
binders) had listings of the commands with the synopsis, either they
did or someone gave such a thing.  That was a big jump start.

The next thing was someone gave me an account on ..!uwvax!slovax which
was an 11/750 that had the 4.2BSD source on it.  Many, many hours reading
the source and having my eyes opened.

--lm

[TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980

[Ralph Corderoy]

Larry wrote:
> I believe the 4BSD manuals (those ones with red/yellow/green plastic
> binders) had listings of the commands with the synopsis, either they
> did or someone gave such a thing.  That was a big jump start.

That sounds like the permuted index of the man page's whatis(1) line
built by ptx(1).  Yes, it was great to skim through that and jump off to
whatever caught one's eye.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy

[TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980

[Chet Ramey]

On 11/10/17 1:06 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Nov 10, 2017 at 12:00:15PM -0600, Will Senn wrote:
>> My question for you citizens of that long-ago era :), is this - what was it
>> like to sit down and learn unix V7 on a PDP? Not from a hardware or
>> ergonomics perspective, but from a human information processing perspective.
>> What resources did you consult in your early days and what did the workflow
>> look like in practical terms.
> 
> I learned on the VAX, did some PDP-11 assembly but I dunno if I ever 
> ran on one.  Definitely spent a lot of time on 11/750, 11/780 and the 8600.

This almost exactly mirrors my experience, except we moved off the VAX
before the 8600. (And I did my PDP-11 assembly programming on the DEC
PRO-350, DEC's PDP-11-based "personal computer.")

I came from TOPS-20, and I agree that the hardest part was learning the
command names and different behaviors. I read the manuals, a couple of
books (including, ironically as it turned out, Steve Bourne's), a bunch
of various source code, and a lot of unix-wizards discussions.

Chet

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet at case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/

[TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980

[Michael Kjörling]

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On 10 Nov 2017 12:00 -0600, from will.senn at gmail.com (Will Senn):
> In V7, it's trickier because apropos doesn't exist, or the
> functional equivalent man -k, for that matter and books are hard to
> find (most deal with System V or BSD. I do find the command 'find
> /usr/man -name "*" -a -print | grep task' to be useful in finding
> man pages, but it's not as general as apropos.
> 
> So, what was the process of learning unix like in the V7 days? What
> were your goto resources? More than just man and the sources? Any
> particular notes, articles, posts, or books that were really helpful
> (I found the article, not the book, "The Unix Programming
> Environment" by Kernighan and Mashey, to be enlightening
> https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/1981/04/01667315.pdf)?

Semi-related thought, possibly helpful: Did the manuals (I mean the
printed ones) have indexes that were meaningful for such purposes? I'm
thinking something like the output of apropos / man -k, not just a
listing of command names and page numbers.

Sure knowing that the description for how to use ls was in section 1
page 42 might have been _helpful_, but not really for finding out _how
to list files_ in the first place...

-- 
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se
                 “People who think they know everything really annoy
                 those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)

[TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Will,

> (I found the article, not the book, "The Unix Programming Environment"
> by Kernighan and Mashey, to be enlightening 

The book is better.  I learnt Unix from it having read K&R to learn C
and being intrigued by these sample commands that were presented.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/013937681X/trofforg-20
I used to rent time on a 3B2 in a neighbouring town a train-ride away
and go there on a Saturday to actually type in what the book presented.

That stopped when I traded in my ARM-based Acorn Archimedes 310 for
Acorn's R140 running BSD 4.2-based Risc iX; like Tony Finch mentioned
the other day IIRC.  ARM 3, 4 MiB RAM, and a 56 MB Rodime ST-506 drive
that housed everything including X and iXi.Desktop(sp?).  Everything on
disk was compressed to fit;  luckily the ARM could decompress quicker
than the rust could spin.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy

[TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980

[Ron Natalie]

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Ø  My question for you citizens of that long-ago era :), is this - what was it like to sit down and learn unix V7 on a PDP? Not from a hardware or ergonomics perspective, but from a human information processing perspective. What resources did you consult in your early days…

I remember this well.   Actually, I started with V6 UNIX.   The biggest difference between using a simulator versus what happened back in 1977 when I started was that I didn’t have exclusive access to the machine.    The Johns Hopkins EE department computer was at the time run by a group called the Undergraduate Computing Society.    Mike Muuss and Pete Koziar were the system programmers at the time I started.    Joe Pistritto was head of operations.   George Toth was in charge of documentation and Bill Lindeman was in charge of hardware, if I remember all this correctly.

The first edition K&R and the printed man pages and related documents were what I started with.   I set about learning C (along with nroff which I had used to write a few freshman papers).  My freshman year, after one too many security failures in the UCS, the EE department pulled the plug on the UCS and gave us adult supervision.   Of course, the work was still done by the students, we just reported to the professor now.    Robert Jesse took over as head of operations and induced me to become an operator.    What I had to learn was the structure of the V6 filesystem and what could go wrong and how to detect and fix things with icheck, dcheck, clri, and the like.

I then badged Mike into giving me access to the UNIX source code (in printed form, the kernel source disk couldn’t be left mounted all the time due to lack of drives).     I can’t tell you how many times I started reading buf.h trying to understand it.   We didn’t have access to the Lyons book at the time.    Finally, one day George Toth was writing a driver for a printer we had gotten and he said he’d write it but wouldn’t debug it.   I volunteered to take it through to completion.   So with a night of scheduled downtime, and Mike supervising me by sleeping in the beenbag chair we had next to the console, I tested and fixed the hardware driver.   After that, I was sort of the go-to guy for driver work.    I also spent a lot of time looking for ways to break security and/or crash the system and then fixing them.   Of course, I soon also became adept at fixing holes other people had exploited.

Around my junior year, the PDP-11/23 came out and one of the labs upstairs got one to run experiments (biomedical engineering).   I got tasked with maintaining that machine and that gave me a nicer platform for kernel hacks because as long as it wasn’t needed for one of the PhD student’s research, I could have it to myself.

Coupled with this hands on was the fact that Mike Muuss believed in liberally applying comments to the UNIX kernel to explain what was going on.   He was so incensed about the “You’re not expected to understand this” comment on the retu/aretu/setka6 code snippet, that he wrote almost a page of explanation as to what was going on.    He was a bit livid when he sent things off to Berkeley for inclusion in BSD releases that they (McKusick?) enforced a common commenting style by deleting all of Mike’s additions.

-Ron

 

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[TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980

[Jon Forrest]

On 11/10/2017 10:00 AM, Will Senn wrote:
>
> My question for you citizens of that long-ago era :), is this - what was 
> it like to sit down and learn unix V7 on a PDP? Not from a hardware or 
> ergonomics perspective, but from a human information processing 
> perspective. What resources did you consult in your early days and what 
> did the workflow look like in practical terms.

I started in 1977 at UC Santa Barbara with Unix V6 that was running on a
PDP11/45 just during the night. The rest of the time it ran RSTS/E. In
fact, there was a sign that said "Oh say can you C by the dawn's early
light" on the wall because the time you were able to learn C was in the
early morning hours.

There wasn't much instructional material available to learn Unix
back then. I remember reading the man pages, and the few tutorials
about the 'ed' editor and the shell. But, I mostly learned stuff by
pestering the few people around who had somehow learned whatever it
was I was trying to figure out. Or, we worked together to figure things
out. I already mentioned the "Eunuch's User Group" meeting we had back
then that brought together many of the few people in S. Cal who were
using Unix back then. In spite of the fact that UCSB was one of the
first nodes on the Arpanet, I don't recall hearing about any way to
use it.

By the time Unix v7 came out, I was able to recognize its various
improvements, such as the 'make' command, the standard io library,
and others. The K&R C book also helped a lot. But still, Unix was
quite primitive and to this day I have the unconscious habit of running
'sync' at every stopping point because, due to the fragility of the
file system back then, doing so was a good way to minimize possible
file system damage when (not if) the system crashed.

Jon Forrest

[TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980

[Ron Natalie]

> I started in 1977 at UC Santa Barbara with Unix V6 that was running on a
> PDP11/45 just during the night. The rest of the time it ran RSTS/E. In fact, there was a sign that said "Oh say can you C by the dawn's early light" on the wall because the time you were able to learn C was in the early
 > morning hours.

Amusingly, the way UNIX got installed at JHU was on the condition that Mike get Basic Plus from RSTS/E to run on it.   This turned out to only require two modifications.    The first was the addition of a system call to turn off the UNIX stack segment.    The second was to emulate enough of the RSTS system calls.    This turned out to be fairly straightforward because RSTS like most of the DEC operating systems used EMT to trap into the kernel whereas UNIX used TRAP.    I've never understood why DEC operating systems used EMT, but it worked out for us.

Years later during the UNIX port to the HEP, we ran UNIX at night while the ersatz HEPOS (fortunately abandoned) ran in the day time.    The Denelcor guys would know we were still up because when they hit ENTER on their terminals the OS would print:   HEP, two, three, four (hey, we were employees of the US Army, albeit civilians).

[TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980

[William Pechter]

Will Senn wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Everyone on the list is well aware that running V7 in a modern
> simulator like SIMH is not a period realistic environment and some of
> the "problems" facing the novice enthusiast are considerably different
> from those of the era (my terminal is orders of magnitude faster and
> my "tape" is a file on a disk). However, many of the challenges facing
> someone in 1980, remain for the enthusiast, such as how to run various
> commands successfully and how devices interoperate with unix. Of
> course, we have do resources and some overlapping experience to draw
> on - duckduckgo (googleish), tuhs member experience, and exposure to
> modern derivatives like linux, macos, bsd, etc. We also have
> documentation of the system in the form of the Programmer's Guide - as
> pdfs and to some degree as man pages on the system (haven't found
> volume 2 documentation on the instance).
>
> My question for you citizens of that long-ago era :), is this - what
> was it like to sit down and learn unix V7 on a PDP? Not from a
> hardware or ergonomics perspective, but from a human information
> processing perspective. What resources did you consult in your early
> days and what did the workflow look like in practical terms.
>
> As an example - today, when I want to know how to accomplish a task in
> modern unix, I:
>
>  1. Search my own experience and knowledge. If I know the answer, duh,
>     I know it.
>  2. Decide if I have enough information about the task to guess at the
>     requisite commands. If I do, then man command is my friend. If
>     not, I try man -k task or apropos task where task is a one word
>     summary of what I'm trying to accomplish.
>  3. If that fails, then I search for the task online and try what
>     other folks have done in similar circumstances.
>  4. If that fails, then I look for an OS specific help list
>     (linux-mint-help, freebsd forums, etc), do another search there,
>     and post a question.
>  5. If that fails, or takes a while, and I know someone with enough
>     knowledge to help, I ask them.
>  6. I find and scan relevant literature or books on the subject for
>     something related.
>
> Repeat as needed.
>
> Programming requires some additional steps:
>
>  1. look at source files including headers and code.
>  2. look at library dependencies
>  3. ask on dev lists
>
> but otherwise, is similar.
>
> In V7, it's trickier because apropos doesn't exist, or the functional
> equivalent man -k, for that matter and books are hard to find (most
> deal with System V or BSD. I do find the command 'find /usr/man -name
> "*" -a -print | grep task' to be useful in finding man pages, but it's
> not as general as apropos.
>
> So, what was the process of learning unix like in the V7 days? What
> were your goto resources? More than just man and the sources? Any
> particular notes, articles, posts, or books that were really helpful
> (I found the article, not the book, "The Unix Programming Environment"
> by Kernighan and Mashey, to be enlightening
> https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/1981/04/01667315.pdf)?
>
> Regards,
>
> Will
>
I came to V7 under emulation, since I didn't really do much Unix until
System III.
I learned Unix as a user using Kochan and Wood's Unix Shell programming
to get used to the shell
syntax, which was very different from CP/M, MS-DOS, RT11, RSTS/E, RSX
and VMS which I dealt with as a DEC Field Engineer.  I picked up the
Nutshell books on Unix, TCP/IP, DNS.

After touching some BSD and Ultrix, I moved back to System V, Xenix
System V (8086/8088) and
Uniplus System III.  I compiled and replaced older tools to get things
like apropos where they
didn't exist.  Don't ask how I got Korn Shell code...

It really helps to have the right friends with access...  When I got ksh
working on SVR2 based
systems and Xenix (at home) I was amazed how much better it was than the
alternatives in '86-88.

One thing that the BSD's and Uniplus had were a number of the original
Unix papers which I
collected in the original troff/nroff (if I could find them).  They were
a great help in understanding
how the systems all went together.

Understanding the history is useful.  I was explaining why there's /bin,
/usr/bin /sbin to a bunch
of new Linux users -- telling them the original RK05's about 2.5
megabytes (1.5 megawords) used to hold the entire system.  Minimal was
important back in the day.
Current compressed Ubuntu linux kernel 4.13 = aproximately 7.5 megabytes.

Now the kernel's larger than the disk was.

Some of the stuff was interesting.  The stty stuff was just plain
wierd.  AT&T assumed hard copy terminals as a default still supporting
only upper case and # as a character erase and Control-C
as an interrupt character made more sense than Ascii DEL.

Once I got my profile standardized to make the systems all look the same
I was good.

There's a nice table on https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/stty/

I picked up the AT&T Sys V docs and the BSD 4.2 and 4.3 docs and worked
backwards to the minimalist Version 7.

My only exposure with V6 was hardware with a bad backplane on an 11/70
corrupting a customer
database back in the mid '80's.  Amazing to find the sysadmins in a Unix
operations and sysadmin
class I was teaching on Pyramid MIServer boxes in the 1993 timeframe
when they were upgrading
to a Pyramid.

Bill

-- 
Digital had it then.  Don't you wish you could buy it now!
pechter-at-gmail.com  http://xkcd.com/705/

[TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980

[Bakul Shah]

On Fri, 10 Nov 2017 12:00:15 -0600 Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> wrote:
Will Senn writes:
> 
> My question for you citizens of that long-ago era :), is this - what was 
> it like to sit down and learn unix V7 on a PDP? Not from a hardware or 
> ergonomics perspective, but from a human information processing 
> perspective. What resources did you consult in your early days and what 
> did the workflow look like in practical terms.
	...
> So, what was the process of learning unix like in the V7 days? What were 
> your goto resources? More than just man and the sources? Any particular 
> notes, articles, posts, or books that were really helpful (I found the 
> article, not the book, "The Unix Programming Environment" by Kernighan 
> and Mashey, to be enlightening 
> https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/1981/04/01667315.pdf)?

I learned by trying out pretty much *every* command in /bin
and /usr/bin. I would read the man page, play with the
command, read the man page some more, and so on. I wrote toy
programs to learn about common libc functions.  I tried out
pretty much every vi command to become better at editing.
Fotunately v7 was a small enough system that one could
actually learn something about every command, every device
driver, every syscall, every libc function etc.

I read the documentation bundled with v7 & BSD, and I read
unix source code as well as observed and learned from seasoned
unix hackers. But I would switch to writing (and rewriting)
code ASAP as I learn better by building something.  And
debugging.  There are lots of learning opportunities there!
The key is not give up until you find the root cause.
Debugging can give a more intuitive sense of how things work
as you start paying more attention to even little things.

[TUHS] finding help in v7 in 1980

[Nemo]

On 10/11/2017, Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> wrote (in part):
> What resources did you consult in your early days and what
> did the workflow look like in practical terms.

I came late to UNIX.  I was not in the proper fiefdom at my
university.  We used VMS and Minix on PCs (I actually received a
samizdat copy from someone in med-sci).  Enlightment came when the
dep't bought a bunch of Sun kit.  By then the two-volume PH series
(with building blocks on the cover, I recall -- most apt) and I read
them cover to cover.  Workflow backend changed but upfront design et
cetera did not.

N.