From: Sean Dwyer <ewe2@ewe2.ninja>
To: Norman Wilson <norman@oclsc.org>
Cc: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?
Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2019 16:12:19 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20191020201219.GA5035@mail.ewe2.ninja> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1571599556.22415.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org>
On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 03:25:52PM -0400, Norman Wilson wrote:
> 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.
Up to my 30s I had only vaguely known about computers, it definitely wasn't my
thing, I was a musician. But one day I found myself buying a $3k Packard Bell
486, learnt DOS and began buying CD-ROMS with software often taken straight
off the big ftp sites. That is how I discovered Unix and how much better than
DOS it was. Within a year (1994) I was running my own Linux system. There was
a lot of stuff being ported from Solaris and the BSDs and I was learning C
just to build utilities I wanted, but if there was a 'killer app' for me that
was the aha! moment, it was a close contest between adventure and ching.
The odd thing was that adventure was certainly playable, but ching only
existed as a weird hybrid of shell script and two C programs and used some
kind of manpage macros and I didn't understand why but I loved it. That was my
introduction really to the Unix tools philosophy and suddenly the way my Linux
system worked made sense. Being also a history buff I wanted to know how this
all happened and that led to Don Libes and Life With Unix and my fate was
sealed.
--
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise as they fly by.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-10-20 20:12 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 120+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-10-20 19:25 Norman Wilson
2019-10-20 20:12 ` Sean Dwyer [this message]
2019-10-21 2:31 ` Ken Thompson via TUHS
2019-10-21 2:37 ` Warren Toomey
2019-10-22 5:25 ` Peter Jeremy
2019-10-22 6:29 ` Sean Dwyer
2019-10-21 2:40 ` Bakul Shah
2019-10-21 2:45 ` Larry McVoy
2019-10-21 10:45 ` jason-tuhs
2019-10-21 11:55 ` William Corcoran
2019-10-22 5:19 ` Adam Thornton
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2019-10-22 13:36 Noel Chiappa
2019-10-22 14:22 ` Abhinav Rajagopalan
2019-10-22 20:08 ` Warren Toomey
2019-10-21 12:34 Noel Chiappa
2019-10-21 12:10 Noel Chiappa
2019-10-21 16:50 ` Angelo Papenhoff
2019-10-16 14:39 Doug McIlroy
2019-10-15 0:28 Pat Barron
2019-10-15 1:19 ` Andrew Warkentin
2019-10-15 4:06 ` Warner Losh
2019-10-14 16:45 Noel Chiappa
2019-10-14 15:32 Doug McIlroy
2019-10-15 8:42 ` Thomas Paulsen
2019-10-13 16:07 Noel Chiappa
2019-10-13 16:25 ` Richard Salz
2019-10-13 3:45 Rudi Blom
2019-10-13 1:57 Jon Steinhart
2019-10-12 13:55 Noel Chiappa
2019-10-12 14:51 ` Ronald Natalie
2019-10-12 4:42 Doug McIlroy
2019-10-12 6:12 ` Adam Thornton
2019-10-12 10:05 ` Steve Nickolas
2019-10-12 12:49 ` Doug McIlroy
2019-10-12 14:26 ` Steve Nickolas
2019-10-10 20:55 Warren Toomey
2019-10-10 21:11 ` SPC
2019-10-10 21:25 ` Jim Capp
2019-10-10 21:33 ` greg travis
2019-10-10 21:13 ` Michael Parson
2019-10-10 21:15 ` Matt Rudge
2019-10-10 21:31 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2019-10-10 21:34 ` Larry McVoy
2019-10-10 23:10 ` Seth J. Morabito
2019-10-10 23:23 ` Brian L. Stuart
2019-10-10 23:28 ` George Michaelson
2019-10-10 23:35 ` Bakul Shah
2019-10-10 23:49 ` David
2019-10-11 1:44 ` Gregg Levine
2019-10-11 1:45 ` Gregg Levine
2019-10-11 10:55 ` Leah Neukirchen
2019-10-11 12:04 ` Tyler Adams
2019-10-13 19:46 ` Peter Jeremy
2019-10-14 2:13 ` Lawrence Stewart
2019-10-14 2:32 ` Rico Pajarola
2019-10-14 9:49 ` Michael Kjörling
2019-10-14 18:36 ` Nemo Nusquam
2019-10-14 21:10 ` Jim Geist
2019-10-14 22:22 ` Warren Toomey
2019-10-14 22:56 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-10-14 23:44 ` Jim Geist
2019-10-14 23:47 ` Adam Thornton
2019-10-14 23:54 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-10-15 0:03 ` Henry Bent
2019-10-14 23:54 ` Ronald Natalie
2019-10-15 0:04 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-10-15 0:06 ` Ronald Natalie
2019-10-15 0:27 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-10-15 0:07 ` George Michaelson
2019-10-15 0:10 ` Larry McVoy
2019-10-14 23:52 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-10-11 12:53 ` KatolaZ
2019-10-11 16:44 ` Pete Wright
2019-10-11 17:13 ` Jim Geist
2019-10-11 17:20 ` Larry McVoy
2019-10-11 17:40 ` Jim Capp
2019-10-11 17:48 ` Larry W. Cashdollar via TUHS
2019-10-11 21:56 ` Tomasz Rola
2019-10-12 2:41 ` ricercar
2019-10-12 3:01 ` Larry McVoy
2019-10-12 14:37 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-10-12 16:12 ` David
2019-10-12 17:59 ` Adam Thornton
2019-10-12 19:10 ` Jon Forrest
2019-10-13 21:45 ` Steve Johnson
2019-10-14 0:36 ` Jon Forrest
2019-10-14 2:08 ` Lawrence Stewart
2019-10-16 13:29 ` Pierre DAVID
2019-10-12 3:23 ` Richard Salz
2019-10-12 3:34 ` Larry McVoy
2019-10-12 21:32 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2019-10-12 8:55 ` Wesley Parish
2019-10-12 10:17 ` Naveen Nathan
2019-10-12 11:54 ` markus schnalke
2019-10-12 19:33 ` Michael Kjörling
2019-10-12 22:38 ` Gregg Levine
2019-10-13 1:37 ` Dan Cross
2019-10-13 15:00 ` Robert Brockway
2019-10-13 15:33 ` arnold
2019-10-13 15:41 ` Larry McVoy
2019-10-13 15:47 ` David Potesta
2019-10-18 1:49 ` Dave Horsfall
2019-10-18 12:07 ` Ronald Natalie
2019-10-21 16:16 ` Dario Niedermann
2019-10-23 5:13 ` Gilles Gravier
2019-10-23 6:19 ` Adam Thornton
2019-10-23 15:08 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-10-23 15:11 ` Larry McVoy
2019-10-23 15:26 ` Arrigo Triulzi
2019-10-23 15:33 ` Dan Cross
2019-10-23 16:19 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-10-23 15:17 ` Richard Salz
2019-10-23 15:22 ` Arrigo Triulzi
2019-10-23 16:45 ` Will Senn
2019-10-23 22:19 ` Adam Thornton
2019-10-24 17:32 ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS
2019-10-26 0:33 ` Dave Horsfall
2019-10-25 20:58 ` John S Quarterman
2019-10-25 22:11 ` Will Senn
2019-10-26 0:57 ` William Corcoran
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