[TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Warren Toomey]

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

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[SPC]

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El jue., 10 oct. 2019 22:56, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> escribió:

>
> 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
>

Me too. But in adittion and specially:

+ the availability of the C compiler
+ syslog

Regards
Sergio Pedraja

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Jim Capp]

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My “aha” moment was the discovery of man pages and the realization that the design of the entire system, from inodes to tty drivers were freely available at my fingertips for perusal. 

It was like having an operating system design course “on-line”, and what a beautiful design!!!

Cheers,

Jim


> On Oct 10, 2019, at 5:11 PM, SPC <spedraja@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> El jue., 10 oct. 2019 22:56, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> escribió:
>> 
>> 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
> 
> 
> Me too. But in adittion and specially:
> 
> + the availability of the C compiler
> + syslog
> 
> Regards
> Sergio Pedraja
> 

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[greg travis]

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Before unix, I had only used a TRS80-III and an Atari 800.  So it was my
first real operating system.  I think I was pretty amazed when I logged in
to my account from a second location and it was the same account, somehow.
Magic!

I was also pretty blown away when my professor used ^T in Unipress Emacs.

On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 5:25 PM Jim Capp <jcapp@anteil.com> wrote:

> My “aha” moment was the discovery of man pages and the realization that
> the design of the entire system, from inodes to tty drivers were freely
> available at my fingertips for perusal.
>
> It was like having an operating system design course “on-line”, and what a
> beautiful design!!!
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jim
>
>
> On Oct 10, 2019, at 5:11 PM, SPC <spedraja@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> El jue., 10 oct. 2019 22:56, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> escribió:
>
>>
>> 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
>>
>
> Me too. But in adittion and specially:
>
> + the availability of the C compiler
> + syslog
>
> Regards
> Sergio Pedraja
>
>

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Michael Parson]

On 2019-10-10 15:55, Warren Toomey 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'm a bit younger, first started playing with Unix systems in 1992, a 
Sun something running SunOS 4.1.something while in collage.  I just 
kinda assumed that this remote system I was accessing over a dial-up 
connection some some big-iron box, I mean, it had dozens of people 
logged into it at a time!  Of course it was something bigger than the PC 
I had at home.  When I first saw a Sun pizza-box, and realized it was 
the same class system I'd been logging into remotely, I was impressed, 
but was still sure it was some magic that made it way more special than 
the PC stuff I was used to.

I later learned about Linux and installed it on a 486DX-50 that had been 
slated to be a backup Novell box at my job.  This was a system that did 
a decent job at being a Novel server, its clone had ~45 systems attached 
to it in the student lab, was a file/print server, etc.  I knew that it 
was a beefy box for Windows (3.1, at the time), but with Linux... With 
Linux, I had X11 on the console, could be playing Doom, browse thew eb 
with Mosaic, etc, while a dozen+ CS students were logged in from the 
Wyse terminals in the next building, and it kept chugging along.

> I was using TOPS-20 beforehand.

I started out on home-PCs of the era: Commodore 64, Apple II, various 
CP/M systems, TI 99/4A, and of course MS/PC-DOS systems.  Unix showed me 
what a computer could really do.  I don't really remember being 
impressed with pipes, for some reason, they just made sense to me.  For 
me, the first time someone showed me xargs, that was cool. It was my 
introduction to command-line scripting.

> Cheers, Warren

-- 
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX
KF5LGQ

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Matt Rudge]

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Thanks for the warm welcome!

For me, it was uucp of all things. I needed to set up a way of
copying mailboxes from one place to another over a modem-to-modem
connection. Unix allowed me to do it with a simple script and minimal
overhead.

When I realised that I also had a C compiler built in then....

On Thu, 10 Oct 2019 at 21:56, 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
>


-- 
www.mattrudge.net - for wibble and guff
blog.mattrudge.net - for Linuxy goodness

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Warren Toomey wrote in <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org>:
 |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:

I get the feeling somebody's watching me!  (However:

  #?0|kent:$ prt-get info xeyes
  Package 'xeyes' not found
  #?255|kent:$ prt-get dsearch xeye
  No matching packages found
  #?255|kent:$ prt-get fsearch xeye
  #?255|kent:$)

 |  + write a simple script

Perl with full set of manual pages available!  (Only as single
page HTML before.)

 |  + to edit a file on the fly

That was really hard, coming from Notepad plus or what its name
was.  Luckily there was MidnightCommander as a NortonCommander
clone, otherwise i would likely have been bogged down.  xedit no,
xemacs no.  There was a graphical editor thing, i think it used
Motif, but i have forgotten.  Had syntax highlighting, but had no
tabs if i recall correctly.  It was a long way to get myself going
with emacs, but finally, after a year or two, came to vim.

The window managers were really hard to get right, i grabbed
a super-cheap SuSE debug CD on 1999-01-11, it used fvwm2.  Focus
follows mouse and much more i could not deal with.  I booted
Windows for working purposes until first of May 1999, when
i finally switched over to fulltime Linux.  (I ended up using
icewm after Enlightenment (cool but to slow) and WindowMaker did
not make it.  Until i discovered ahwm, which then was it.  Only
recently i switched to cwm.)

 |  + with no temporary files (a la pipes)

That did bother you.  I am superficial.  And i came in via 4DOS.
And as a Basic, .BAT and perl "programmer".

 |  + AND I can change the file suffix and the system won't stop me!

Discovery of shebang was a tremendous moment.  And anything around
that.  Discovery of manuals, for example the GNU C library manual!
Ah, it soon was discovery of the entire basic UNIX tool set, that
dispersed set of tools acting together for a greater whole!  That
was really, really great.

 |I was using TOPS-20 beforehand.

C64/GEOS, Win 3.1/DOS, Windows95/4DOS. 

 |Cheers, Warren
 --End of <20191010205546.GA29154@minnie.tuhs.org>

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 06:55:46AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
> 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?

Unix was pretty much the first thing I used.  I did regress to CPM Z80
based machine because 40-60 users on a 1Mhz (I think) VAX was crazy
slow, even though it had disk and I think 4MB of ram, the 128K 4mhz
z80 with floppies was faster.

I wrote assembly versions of ls, cp, mv, rm, etc - assembly so that 
I could cram the program into a 512 byte sector (both for speed of
loading as well as for small size).

The aha moment for me was one of the many times I was logged into
slovax (an 11/750 that had the BSD source on it) reading popen.c
and got to the point where it forked a process.  It blew my mind,
here I am in libc and it's creating processes for me.  I just didn't
expect that but was struck by the thought "huh, these Unix guys don't
fool around, they use the abstractions they advertise".

I expected something like Windows spawn or some VMS complex thing,
I sure as heck didn't expect fork and exec, shows how naive I was 
at the time.  Fun times.

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Seth J. Morabito]

Warren Toomey writes:

> 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?

A fun topic!

I'm a bit on the young side, so Unix was my first exposure to any kind
of timesharing or multi-user system. Prior to getting access to MIPS
Ultrix 4.2 on a DECstation, my experience consisted ENTIRELY of:

    * 8-bit systems, mainly Commodore 64 and Tandy TRS-80
    * The Commodore Amiga 1000 and 500
    * DOS and Windows 3.0 in the form of an IBM PC XT and a PS/2

Then, when I arrived at Cornell University in 1992, I discovered that
there was a network of three clustered DECstations, sharing about 2GB
(!) of system and user disk space. Enormous!

As an avid reader of BYTE Magazine, I had _heard_ of Unix in the trade
press, but I didn't honestly know what it was. I was plunged head first
into it as a user, and quickly found myself addicted. I did get some
guidance from a few experienced users, so I wasn't completely on my
own. I owe them quite a bit for their patience and guidance.

For me, the "Aha!" moment was entirely related to being attached to
Usenet and the Internet. The fact that I could suddently read email
(with the RAND MH system) and Usenet (with nn) and communicate with all
of these very clever people all over the world was positively
intoxicating.

My love only grew when I discovered that there was a C compiler
installed, and that I could build my own programs from source downloaded
by FTP. Later, Perl 4 was installed, and I learned how to write my own
programs. It was an exciting time in my young life.

-Seth
--
Seth Morabito
Poulsbo, WA, USA
web@loomcom.com

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Brian L. Stuart]

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 On Thursday, October 10, 2019, 4:55:58 PM EDT, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote:
> 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?

For me, it was reading the source code on 6th Ed.
Seeing the elegance, simplicity, and beauty was
like seeing the Mona Lisa for the first time or
hearing Beethoven's 9th for the first time.

To this day, I still remember looking through some
of the userland code and saw that who figured out
if you use it in "who am i" just by looking at argc.
Using as "who are you" or "who really cares" was
fun, but the real effect was realizing how much
more I'd understand by reading code than by reading
documentation.

BLS
  

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[George Michaelson]

Wanting to print something and reaching for Tops-10 PIP.. to realize I
didn't need to do that. Irrational concepts did not carry across

Logging in by name but having my uid:gid map naturally to the Tops-10
[xxxx,yyy] form. -Rational concepts carried across

Learn. "omg. Is that all there is? really? is it that simple? you mean
the file permissions flags ARE BITS IN A WORD"

RUNOF -> nroff.

The pascal and fortran experience was a bit of a backwards step. But
makefiles were logical, and once I stopped writing in fortran, things
got remarkably better.

csh in many ways. I know that's heresy for a lot of people, but some
things were just subtly easier in csh. I didn't write csh scripts.

-G

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Bakul Shah]

On Oct 10, 2019, at 1:55 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

Being an OS student I had read "The Unix Timesharing System" paper by
Ritchie and Thompson and had wanted to use Unix years before I actually
had the chance. I don't remember an "Aha!" moment but I took to it like
a duck to water. Most everything felt just so comfortable and right.
It was very much as I had imagined it to be.

Prior to it I had used TSO, TOPS-10, VM/CMS and VMS. And CP/M @home.

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[David]

> On Oct 10, 2019, at 4:35 PM, Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> wrote:
> 
> On Oct 10, 2019, at 1:55 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 was at UCSD on the Pascal project, so I was used to using a machine with
a nice editor and had access to the OS source code to play with and learn from.
When UCSD spun the Pascal project out to SofTech MicroSystems I moved as
well. SofTech had a pdp 11/45 running V6 with the famous patch tape.

We called it V6.9.

When I first logged in, it was just a feeling of simplicity and elegance. I could
edit files, move them around on the disk, and when I was curious about what
was happening under the covers, I could go look at the sources.

Aha - I could use the shell to script the formatting of text files making the task
of generating new printed documentation for the Pascal Project something
as easy as saying ./printdocs.sh. After that it was all nroff, vi, and C compiler
experiences, learning what really made this system tick.

Back at UCSD I got access to the VAX (sdcsvax) and did all of my homework
there never again returning to the Pascal system on the Terak boxes.

Never looked back, I’ve been using Unix as my OS ever since.

	David

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Gregg Levine]

Hello!
Me? I got started bitbanging my way through things on Apple 2 designs,
and then DOS on a grouch PC/XT clone from AT&T, and then a PC/AT clone
also from AT&T, there I also included Windows. Around the time the
P100 came out from Intel I also stuffed Slackware onto it in the form
their Zipslack, and about the time I'd gotten connected to the 'net, I
found your site, and off I went. I'd run UNIX on SIMH/pdp-11. (Amazing
stuff that!) And for your Larry I also had a Sun system here who also
ran first my website, then just the background stuff.

Meeting Ken sometime earlier at the VCF East, and recognizing Brian
from his style, made me realize that Armstrong the musician was right
about it being a "wonderful world". especially watching the big gaggle
of machines celebrating the wonders of UNiX.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."

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

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Gregg Levine]

Hello again.
(Silly keyboard.) That line regarding the Sun box, should read "for you Larry".
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."

On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 9:44 PM Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello!
> Me? I got started bitbanging my way through things on Apple 2 designs,
> and then DOS on a grouch PC/XT clone from AT&T, and then a PC/AT clone
> also from AT&T, there I also included Windows. Around the time the
> P100 came out from Intel I also stuffed Slackware onto it in the form
> their Zipslack, and about the time I'd gotten connected to the 'net, I
> found your site, and off I went. I'd run UNIX on SIMH/pdp-11. (Amazing
> stuff that!) And for your Larry I also had a Sun system here who also
> ran first my website, then just the background stuff.
>
> Meeting Ken sometime earlier at the VCF East, and recognizing Brian
> from his style, made me realize that Armstrong the musician was right
> about it being a "wonderful world". especially watching the big gaggle
> of machines celebrating the wonders of UNiX.
> -----
> Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
> "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
>
> 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

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Leah Neukirchen]

Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> writes:

> 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?

I'm not sure if this was *my* "Aha, Unix!" moment, but my Dad
complained once that he had some CSV file containing bills and needed
to do some computation, and it would be a hassle to do in Delphi
(which he is most proficient in).  So I told him I could have a look
at it on my Linux system, and while he explained what computations he
needed, I would type in some awk oneliner and a bit of other pipe
stuff and he had his answer within minutes.

-- 
Leah Neukirchen  <leah@vuxu.org>  https://leahneukirchen.org/

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Tyler Adams]

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One of the things that makes unix so special to me is how many different
ways I had the "Aha" moment.

Viscerally, I got drawn in after I tried writing some Batch script for a
windows machine and found bash so much easier.

Intellectually, ESR's Art of Unix Programming really shown a light onto
what made unix feel so fun. Seeing the unix principles laid out shortly and
clearly was world changing.

Then when Apple and Google pumped out 3 BILLION unix like devices and made
unix mainstream, it just nailed it in that unix is a really special piece
of software*.*

 Tyler


On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 1:56 PM Leah Neukirchen <leah@vuxu.org> wrote:

> Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> writes:
>
> > 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?
>
> I'm not sure if this was *my* "Aha, Unix!" moment, but my Dad
> complained once that he had some CSV file containing bills and needed
> to do some computation, and it would be a hassle to do in Delphi
> (which he is most proficient in).  So I told him I could have a look
> at it on my Linux system, and while he explained what computations he
> needed, I would type in some awk oneliner and a bit of other pipe
> stuff and he had his answer within minutes.
>
> --
> Leah Neukirchen  <leah@vuxu.org>  https://leahneukirchen.org/
>

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Peter Jeremy]

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I don't recall a specific aha moment either.  Possibly it was make - I had
previously expressed a wish for some sort of dependency tracking mechanism
to speed up the build system I was using in my job, and had been told it
couldn't be done.  I was impressed that Unix provided one out of the box.

On 2019-Oct-11 15:04:15 +0300, Tyler Adams <coppero1237@gmail.com> wrote:
>Then when Apple and Google pumped out 3 BILLION unix like devices and made
>unix mainstream, it just nailed it in that unix is a really special piece
>of software*.*

Well, whilst Apple and Google products are built around a Unix-like core,
none of them expose the Unix UI to normal users.  And, if you come from a
Unix background, even once you access the underlying core, the differences
are more likely to trip you up than make you feel at home.  Instead, they
each have their own, proprietary UI, together with a relatively proprietary
development environment.  None of them are going to introduce a new
generation to Unix or generate Unix evangelists.

-- 
Peter Jeremy

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Lawrence Stewart]

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

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Rico Pajarola]

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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
>
>

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Michael Kjörling]

On 13 Oct 2019 19:32 -0700, from rp@servium.ch (Rico Pajarola):
> Then I bought O'Reilly's "Unix Power Tools" book (which I recommend to
> anyone. Great book).

Speaking of that book, it's available in ebook form as part of Humble
Bundle's current "Linux & UNIX" bundle.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/linux-unix-oreilly-books

USD 1 for that book and a few others.

I made a longer post about that bundle to the COFF list.

-- 
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael@kjorling.se
  “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person
              is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor)

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Nemo Nusquam]

On 10/14/19 05:49, Michael Kjörling wrote:
> On 13 Oct 2019 19:32 -0700, from rp@servium.ch (Rico Pajarola):
>> Then I bought O'Reilly's "Unix Power Tools" book (which I recommend to
>> anyone. Great book).
> Speaking of that book, it's available in ebook form as part of Humble
> Bundle's current "Linux & UNIX" bundle.
>
> https://www.humblebundle.com/books/linux-unix-oreilly-books
>
> USD 1 for that book and a few others.
Mininum is USD1 but I humbly suggest paying more.

N.

(And I still have the first print edition.)

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Jim Geist]

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I mentioned earlier in this thread that my first exposure to Unix was on
our school's VAX many years ago. Today someone from school gifted me an
original copy of the VAX 4.2BSD Unix User's Manual, complete with a B&W
drawing of the daemon on the cover.

I didn't know that John Lasseter of Pixar fame was responsible for that
logo.

On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 2:44 PM Nemo Nusquam <cym224@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On 10/14/19 05:49, Michael Kjörling wrote:
> > On 13 Oct 2019 19:32 -0700, from rp@servium.ch (Rico Pajarola):
> >> Then I bought O'Reilly's "Unix Power Tools" book (which I recommend to
> >> anyone. Great book).
> > Speaking of that book, it's available in ebook form as part of Humble
> > Bundle's current "Linux & UNIX" bundle.
> >
> > https://www.humblebundle.com/books/linux-unix-oreilly-books
> >
> > USD 1 for that book and a few others.
> Mininum is USD1 but I humbly suggest paying more.
>
> N.
>
> (And I still have the first print edition.)
>

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Warren Toomey]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 05:10:31PM -0400, Jim Geist wrote:
>    I mentioned earlier in this thread that my first exposure to Unix was
>    on our school's VAX many years ago. Today someone from school gifted me
>    an original copy of the VAX 4.2BSD Unix User's Manual, complete with a
>    B&W drawing of the daemon on the cover.
>    I didn't know that John Lasseter of Pixar fame was responsible for that
>    logo.

I donated this image to Kirk from my set a while back:
https://www.mckusick.com/beastie/gif/4.2daemon.gif

Cheers, Warren

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Arthur Krewat]

There's a small intersection between Lasseter and NYIT where I currently 
work. A friend worked there during the CGL/NYIT days, and when they 
closed up, I dumpster dived a lot of stuff.

Including the NFS 2.0 sources that Warren currently has in the TUHS 
archives ;)

Towards the end, they were using BSD 4.3 on Vaxen - I even got my hands 
on a couple of 750's, which have been ruined over the years because of 
environmental problems with the storage location. I do still have a 
complete set of boards.

I still have an RM05 pack, labeled /pix ... probably way past the 
ability to be read, I'm afraid, unless someone wants to sacrifice an 
RM05 drive to try.

art k.


On 10/14/2019 5:10 PM, Jim Geist wrote:
> I mentioned earlier in this thread that my first exposure to Unix was 
> on our school's VAX many years ago. Today someone from school gifted 
> me an original copy of the VAX 4.2BSD Unix User's Manual, complete 
> with a B&W drawing of the daemon on the cover.
>
> I didn't know that John Lasseter of Pixar fame was responsible for 
> that logo.

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Jim Geist]

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I can't remember, can the 750 run off of normal power or does it require
3-phase?

On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 6:56 PM Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote:

> There's a small intersection between Lasseter and NYIT where I currently
> work. A friend worked there during the CGL/NYIT days, and when they
> closed up, I dumpster dived a lot of stuff.
>
> Including the NFS 2.0 sources that Warren currently has in the TUHS
> archives ;)
>
> Towards the end, they were using BSD 4.3 on Vaxen - I even got my hands
> on a couple of 750's, which have been ruined over the years because of
> environmental problems with the storage location. I do still have a
> complete set of boards.
>
> I still have an RM05 pack, labeled /pix ... probably way past the
> ability to be read, I'm afraid, unless someone wants to sacrifice an
> RM05 drive to try.
>
> art k.
>
>
> On 10/14/2019 5:10 PM, Jim Geist wrote:
> > I mentioned earlier in this thread that my first exposure to Unix was
> > on our school's VAX many years ago. Today someone from school gifted
> > me an original copy of the VAX 4.2BSD Unix User's Manual, complete
> > with a B&W drawing of the daemon on the cover.
> >
> > I didn't know that John Lasseter of Pixar fame was responsible for
> > that logo.
>
>

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Adam Thornton]

> On Oct 14, 2019, at 4:44 PM, Jim Geist <velocityboy@gmail.com> wrote:
> I can't remember, can the 750 run off of normal power or does it require 3-phase?


730 looks like it runs off plain old 220V (haven’t tried yet).  I would expect the 750 to be the same but I don’t actually know.

Adam

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Arthur Krewat]

On 10/14/2019 7:47 PM, Adam Thornton wrote:
>> On Oct 14, 2019, at 4:44 PM, Jim Geist <velocityboy@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I can't remember, can the 750 run off of normal power or does it require 3-phase?
>
> 730 looks like it runs off plain old 220V (haven’t tried yet).  I would expect the 750 to be the same but I don’t actually know.
>

True, the 750 might need 220. I really can't remember. But when I set up 
a few, with a TU78, and a few RM05's at the warehouse I was storing 
them, I really only needed a single phase.

And again, in the US, 220 requires "two phases" but the actual equipment 
only needed a single source of 220. So it was "single phase". Clear as 
mud? :)


ak

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Henry Bent]

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On Mon, 14 Oct 2019 at 19:54, Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote:

> On 10/14/2019 7:47 PM, Adam Thornton wrote:
> >> On Oct 14, 2019, at 4:44 PM, Jim Geist <velocityboy@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I can't remember, can the 750 run off of normal power or does it
> require 3-phase?
> >
> > 730 looks like it runs off plain old 220V (haven’t tried yet).  I would
> expect the 750 to be the same but I don’t actually know.
> >
>
> True, the 750 might need 220. I really can't remember. But when I set up
> a few, with a TU78, and a few RM05's at the warehouse I was storing
> them, I really only needed a single phase.
>
> And again, in the US, 220 requires "two phases" but the actual equipment
> only needed a single source of 220. So it was "single phase". Clear as
> mud? :)
>
>
> ak
>

A quick trawl through the Bitsavers 11/750 field maintenance docs did not
definitively answer the question.  Looks like it could have been 240V 12A
or 120V 24A.

-Henry

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Ronald Natalie]

There is no DEC process cabinets that is really three phase.    Some of the power controllers (notably the VAX 780 and the larger PDP-11’s), that had three phase cords on them but all they do is split out the three phases as three 120V circuits.
I believe Armando Stetner made use of this when he ran a VAX in his hotel room at one of the conferences, he just ran 120V extension cords all over the place to get it up.

There are some of the old washing machine harddisks that were designed to run on 208/240 (still single phase).   I’m not sure if the RP06’s fell into this category but some of the Storage Tek drives did.

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Arthur Krewat]

On 10/14/2019 7:54 PM, Ronald Natalie wrote:
> There are some of the old washing machine harddisks that were designed to run on 208/240 (still single phase).
Yup, exactly. Still takes "two phases" to make 208/240 in the US.

ak

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Ronald Natalie]

Absolutely INCORRECT.   The drives see (and the power cord only provides) ONE phase.

208 is essentially a single phase voltage you get by connecting two of your three phase legs. 
240 V on 120/240 is only single phase.

> On Oct 14, 2019, at 7:04 PM, Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote:
> 
> On 10/14/2019 7:54 PM, Ronald Natalie wrote:
>> There are some of the old washing machine harddisks that were designed to run on 208/240 (still single phase).
> Yup, exactly. Still takes "two phases" to make 208/240 in the US.
> 
> ak

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Arthur Krewat]

That's exactly my point. For example, in my house, I have two phases. 
Each one, to neutral, gets me 120 volts.

If I use both phases, I get 220.

The equipment might be "single phase 220", but I need two phases out of 
the electric panel to get it.

Sorry, I may not have explained myself well enough ;)


On 10/14/2019 8:06 PM, Ronald Natalie wrote:
> Absolutely INCORRECT.   The drives see (and the power cord only provides) ONE phase.
>
> 208 is essentially a single phase voltage you get by connecting two of your three phase legs.
> 240 V on 120/240 is only single phase.
>
>> On Oct 14, 2019, at 7:04 PM, Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote:
>>
>> On 10/14/2019 7:54 PM, Ronald Natalie wrote:
>>> There are some of the old washing machine harddisks that were designed to run on 208/240 (still single phase).
>> Yup, exactly. Still takes "two phases" to make 208/240 in the US.
>>
>> ak
>
>

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[George Michaelson]

Tracy Kidder evokes different emotions around "the soul of a new
machine" -To me, the book is great because its a humanist reading of
technology choices. People matter. Careers are built on seemingly
trivial decisions like the size of the average door frame in a lift in
Tokyo. (a brief moment in the book, from memory)

I always wished it had been written about Digital Equipment and not
Data General, because the only DG box I worked on (a Nova) was a dog.
I know one person who came from Australia (UQ) to Maynard, to track
the building of the Dec-10 destined for the campus. He had
entertaining anecdotes about parking and weather. (australians are not
naturally prepared for 2m of snow and the effect of parking in the
wrong side of the snow shadow, which explains why the parking spots
were empty for the visitor to claim) -I think the birth of the pdp-8
and pdp-11 would be fascinating. I was told the queue to sign up for
pdp-8 at the IFIP  floor show  in the 60s in Edinburgh was a mile
long: people were dog tired of walking card decks over to central
computing facilities and the offer of a deskside or even desktop (if
your desk was strong enough) compute engine for stats and maths and
process control...

Sub-floor radius limits made it hard to retrofit a Cray into the UQ
machine room because the piping radii had been done for the IBM
mainframe. We had to lift the raised floor for the flourinert piping.
400Hz voltage demanded a spinning metal regenerator to do frequency
conversion from the Australian wallplate voltage/frequency. Our
groundplane was inadequate. The Tops-10 box, the cluster of Vaxen,
were completely oblivious to most of this: they did air cooling
through floor venting, thats really all that mattered in their
machine-room.  It was the one we chose to fit the comms racks because
it was the least pain to work in, and the nearest to the hosts which
could actually use Internet protocols trivially on UTP or thinwire.
(the IBM required us to buy a $10,000 PC to fit the line card which
translated TCP/IP into IBM networking and was possibly the last piece
of "thickwire" ethernet we owned)

-G

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 10:07:34AM +1000, George Michaelson wrote:
> I always wished it had been written about Digital Equipment and not
> Data General ...
> -I think the birth of the pdp-8 and pdp-11 would be fascinating. 

+1.  I'd read that book in a heartbeat.

[TUHS] Supercomputer UNIX (was Aga moments).

[Ronald Natalie]

I’ll omit comments on Data Generals, DEC-10/20, and other non-UNIX stuff.

We had a series of three supercomputers at the BRL.    The first was the Denelcor HEP which was pretty much purpose built for us.   Originally slated to be an Analog, then Hybrid, it ended up as a MIMD ECL-logic digital machine.   Denelcor was stalled on what OS to use and was writing their own proprietary one when we stepped in and told them we would put UNIX on the thing.     The thing was slated to share the main computer center room with the last Cyber 7600 ever build.    We had taped out the location of all the cabinets on the floor around this building pillar.     Shortly after I started at the labs, I flew out to Denelcor and noted that the machine was sitting on their floor in our configuration except they had tape where our building pillar was.    It was kind of a fun research exercise.   The thing had 4 PEMs which each could run 8 independent (what we would call in UNIX) processes.    The hardware could also schedule for each of these up to 256 (what we would call in UNIX) threads.   All the memory had two semaphores on each word (full/empty bits) and the various load/store operations could be told to “wait for full” or “wait for empty.”

The I/O on the thing was a box that had 32 individual UNIBUSs on it.   It’s memory showed up on the common memory bus (really a big network) without the semaphore bits.   I wrote all the UNIX IO code to drive this stuff and found out that it was taking forever to start I/Os.    This was because they had put the control logic on this secondary bus called (aptly) “The Low Speed Bus.”    The LSB’s primary function was to get the machine booted up (which involved programming the network swtich for the regular memory channel).   Confronted with the problem at the local Golden Corral one night, Burton Smith the original designer and I designed a new control system to use a spare PDP-11/34 I had that would connect things up direct to the highspeed memory.   It ran the same pidjin OS that our internet routers ran (LOS…no time for sharing, uniprocessor system).

Tthe thing excelled at highly parallelizable stuff like Mike’s raytrace code and really all it ever got used for is to make a movie “A Shell’s-eye view of a tank.”

It got shutdown and promplty replaced with the Army’s first “real” supercomputer, a Cray X/MP.    This particular machine was slated for delivery to Apple, but the Army used “emergency” authority to get Cray to give it to us.    We pretty much insisted on runing UNICOS (Cray’s UNIX) rather than Cray’s prorpietary OS.     As I recall, the X/MP didn’t really require anything special as far as facility goes.    There’s a picture in my files somewhere of me standing in the middle of the thing peering out.

One of my last jobs at BRL was to be on the selection board for the Cray 2 there.    That as the previous poster states, required a lot of specialized facility work.   It wasn’t installed before I left, but it was my signature that was on the $25 Million dollar procurement paperwork for that thing.

Amusingly, Mike wanted to call the two machines Patton and Rommel (hey, it’s the army).   We named the XMP Patton, but then one of our interns whose last name was Patton managed to wreck his car and kill himself so the powers that be decided that the Patton name would officially dedicated to him and nixed the idea of Rommel.   The Cray 2 was named after long term director of the laboratory, Robert J. Eichelberger (father of modern shaped charges).   The problem is that Eichelberger wasn’t a workable name on the network, and RJE had bad connotations with regard to old mainframe submittals.    The machine was officially known as “Bob.”

Re: [TUHS] Supercomputer UNIX (was Aha moments).

[Ronald Natalie]

One project I did get to try was to see if I could vectorize the UNIX crypt routine.     There was a common joke at the time that if a hacker had a Cray, he might be able to derive a lot of passwords.   Since my job a the time had officially computer security in it, I got to try.   It wasn’t as much fun as converting the SGI flight simulator to use TCP/IP so that when 6PM rolled around every day all the SGI’s at the lab went into a massive dog fight.    I remember being collared at an IETC meeting at NASA Ames and being forced to give them the mods.    I figured I killed productivity at NASA for quite a bit with that move.

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Arthur Krewat]

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 From what I remember, the 750 will run off single-phase 110 volt. So 
will an RM05, but it has to be 220 (which, in the US, requires two 
phases to make 220).

I think only the RP06/7's really needed 3-phase, but even then, I could 
be wrong. Most of this DEC equipment really only needed single-phase, 
but balancing the load was always a good idea in places that were 
already 3-phase capable.



On 10/14/2019 7:44 PM, Jim Geist wrote:
> I can't remember, can the 750 run off of normal power or does it 
> require 3-phase?
>
> On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 6:56 PM Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net 
> <mailto:krewat@kilonet.net>> wrote:
>
>     There's a small intersection between Lasseter and NYIT where I
>     currently
>     work. A friend worked there during the CGL/NYIT days, and when they
>     closed up, I dumpster dived a lot of stuff.
>
>     Including the NFS 2.0 sources that Warren currently has in the TUHS
>     archives ;)
>
>     Towards the end, they were using BSD 4.3 on Vaxen - I even got my
>     hands
>     on a couple of 750's, which have been ruined over the years
>     because of
>     environmental problems with the storage location. I do still have a
>     complete set of boards.
>
>     I still have an RM05 pack, labeled /pix ... probably way past the
>     ability to be read, I'm afraid, unless someone wants to sacrifice an
>     RM05 drive to try.
>
>     art k.
>
>
>     On 10/14/2019 5:10 PM, Jim Geist wrote:
>     > I mentioned earlier in this thread that my first exposure to
>     Unix was
>     > on our school's VAX many years ago. Today someone from school
>     gifted
>     > me an original copy of the VAX 4.2BSD Unix User's Manual, complete
>     > with a B&W drawing of the daemon on the cover.
>     >
>     > I didn't know that John Lasseter of Pixar fame was responsible for
>     > that logo.
>


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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[KatolaZ]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 06:55:46AM +1000, Warren Toomey 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?
> 

[cut]

Disclaimer: I am on the young-ish side as well.

I learned the basic Unix commands and the use of vi(1) from a book,
some four or five years before I sat in front of a unix login prompt
(around '91 or '92). I just found the whole thing amazing, so I
re-read that book several times, waiting for the day when I would have
been there for real.

Then finally that day came, and that was my "aahhh, Unix!"
moment. Instantly, everything made so much sense. As somebody else
suggested, I really felt like a duck plunging in a pond for the first
time.

Since then, it has been just a sequence of "aha! Unix!" moments, like
when I conjured a longish pipe which solved in 30 seconds a reporting
problem on which two people had spent about two weeks, or when I left
a colleague jaw-dropped after seeing how I fitted several million data
points to a reference distribution with an awk+bc oneliner :P

HND

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Pete Wright]

On 10/10/19 1:55 PM, Warren Toomey 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?

For me it happened in highschool - 1992/1993.  I had been playing around 
with my i386 at home which had a modem and i used to dial into my local 
library and eventually bbs's and stuff.  then my school offered a class 
on Earth Systems Science which was partly funded and sponsored by NASA 
which was awesome by itself, but for me the real turning point was our 
computer lab had an SGI indigo workstation.  everything about it blew my 
mind, i have very clear memories of learning how to download satalite 
data via ftp, use tar to expand the data then visualize it.  i also 
remember bugging one of the smarter guys in the class how he changed his 
prompt to look so cool :^)

this workstation also had mosaic and we were all given email addresses 
(domain gaia.circles.org, even had a webpage hosted there!).

so for me - this Unix aha! moment was very closely mixed with an 
Internet aha! moment when i discovered how much more info was available 
to me compared to my local suburban library :)

-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete@nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Jim Geist]

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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.

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 01:13:37PM -0400, Jim Geist wrote:
> 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.

Our CS department had a mainframe as well, also a handful of 11/750s and
11/780s.  The compiler class was taught on the mainframe, the prof had
a lex/yacc clone he had written and wanted us to use that.

My buddy Rob Netzer and I had 3B1 (Unix PC) or maybe 2, I think I had
one as well, and we asked the prof if we could do the class on those.
Rob had to write the lex/yacc clone to be compat with the profs, he
did and we happily avoided using the mainframe.  We were very sold
on Unix by then.

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Jim Capp]

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Thanks Jim. Your story about BASIC and C reminded me of another "aha" moment. 


My first programming job involving UNIX in the early 1980's was to send data to an IBM mainframe via 2780/3780 binary synchronous communications (BSC). 


I started writing a HEX dump utility using BASIC. I wasn't happy with the execution speed and started reading man pages. 


I discovered C. Having done some work with assembly, I immediately recognized the similarity and function as a "portable assembler". 


By that time, UNIX had been ported to at least a dozen different architectures. 


I was sold on the design, utility, and "openness" of the documentation, and have been working with nearly every flavor of *NIX ever since. 


Cheers, 


Jim 





From: "Jim Geist" <velocityboy@gmail.com> 
To: "Warren Toomey" <wkt@tuhs.org> 
Cc: "The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs@tuhs.org> 
Sent: Friday, October 11, 2019 1:13:37 PM 
Subject: Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment? 







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. 

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Larry W. Cashdollar via TUHS]

>On 10/10/19, 4:56 PM, "TUHS on behalf of Warren Toomey" <tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org on behalf of wkt@tuhs.org> wrote:
    
 >  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?

When I first typed ps -x and saw all the running processes on the system.  That was on a Dec Alpha at the university of southern Maine in the computer science lab.   I thought to myself I need this on my PC.  A few weeks later my friend pointed me at Slackware.     

-- Larry C$
    
    

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Tomasz Rola]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 06:55:46AM +1000, Warren Toomey 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.

I am from this previous dozen. The current one, I guess, might have
come here with help of outlets like Lobsters and HN.

> 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?

Oh, that is a good question.

I think I had a few aha's which are now faded, but the one I remember
well was when I wrote a program which was to be described in a
document, and it generated lots of data (20mb, which for me, in
mid-1990-ies, was a lot - today, one of my org files is bigger and I
keep adding to it every day). There was no way I would want to process
this data by hand, and reading it into Excel was a no-no either,
because typical Windows machine had 4-8 megs of ram and I did not
think they would be able to handle this task. The files compressed
well (like, 20:1). So I wrote some shell scripts and (n)awk scripts,
find-ed compressed files, feeded uncompressed data via pipe and awk
made nice tables for LaTeX and data for gnuplot. On a machine that had
4mb of ram itself.

So, that was a moment - I could use Unix and the tools to make things
requiring much bigger machines (if they were not running Unix).

Later on, knowing some nuances of Unix helped me a lot, even if those
were really small tricks. Like, using 'cp -l' to copy huge source tree
to user with inadequate quota and then compile it. Later on, I bought
me a crappy modem without hardware error control, and it was unusable
when connection was made from Windows/DOS (time counted in seconds,
then hangup because of line errors). Again, Unix (Linux, actually) to
the rescue - after I learned to use ppp, hangups became extremely
rare, even if many times connection was despetately slow. Still, slow
was better than none.

> 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.

Before I started to use university SunOS, I was using university's VAX
for a year and Amiga at home. On Amiga, I sometimes played and
sometimes played with a system. So I already had some expectations
about what a computer should be like (at least, the "my
computer"). Before that, I spent few years playing on and off with
other people's 8-bit computers (with their knowledge, of course) -
Atari (800?), Polish-made Meritum-1 (docs said it was CP/M capable,
but at that time, I had hard time getting more info on this and
programing simple stuff in Basic was low hanging fruit).

While Amiga gave me many early pleasures of multitasking (playing
Centurion and doing low-priority fractal in the background, just for
the kicks), and I kept her up to 1994, SunOS quickly dwarfed
her. Around 1994 I got introduced to the Linux concept by a bud.

Anyway, I installed Slackware on 486 and was able to configure olvwm
on it, thus having almost same look as uni-SunOS. Which helped with
adoption. After that, fvwm. After some time with KDE and Gnome, back
to fvwm, because it just works.

There is still plenty to learn. I feel like I barely licked the
surface. My recent memorable aha was when I wrote a script in Elisp
rather than in bash, as usually. Elisp is hardly a scripting language,
it just copes in some cases, but for some reason complicated flow
control looked much better than I expected.

Another aha was after reading that running stuff in pipes may
outperform some well know parallel computing frameworks. Yes indeed,
each part of multipipe runs on different cpu and OS takes care of
making the flows as fluent as it can. And the concept of pipe is,
what, more than fourty years old? Almost fifty? This quite an aha, I
think.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola@bigfoot.com             **

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[ricercar]

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Perhaps impertinent since it's not part of the UNIX standard, but probably when
I first started using emacs. I have also grown to appreciate ed, though I
learned that quite a bit later.

On 10/10/19 3:55 PM, Warren Toomey 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
>
>

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 09:41:07PM -0500, ricercar@lycos.com wrote:
> I first started using emacs. I have also grown to appreciate ed, though I
> learned that quite a bit later.

If you were on some 300 baud dial up modem, ed made tons of sense.  You
had a mental picture of the file in your head, you didn't need to see
all of it in real time, that was wasteful.  ed let you see as much as
you needed and as little as was productive.  And it worked without 
termcap.  ed rocks, it's yet another little program that does what
it needs to do and no more.

ed was like a lot of stuff that Bell Labs did that dated back to the
days when getting a print out took a day or so.  pic(1) is a great
example of that.  I *love* pic because I can look at the input to
pic and I can see what it will look like.  xfig and friends are 
not so much.

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 08:01:55PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> If you were on some 300 baud dial up modem, ed made tons of sense.  You
> had a mental picture of the file in your head, you didn't need to see
> all of it in real time, that was wasteful.  ed let you see as much as
> you needed and as little as was productive.  And it worked without 
> termcap.  ed rocks, it's yet another little program that does what
> it needs to do and no more.
> 
> ed was like a lot of stuff that Bell Labs did that dated back to the
> days when getting a print out took a day or so....

ed isn't all that different from most of the text based editors from
that era.  My first text based editor was "edit" from the PDP-8's 4k
disk monitor system.  The "monitor" was located in the high 128
(12-bit) word page of the PDP-8's 4k core memory, and the editor and
its text buffer had to fit in the bottom 3968 words, which meant you
had to read and edit your program file in small chunks[1].

[1] https://www.pdp8.net/asr33/dms_session.shtml

The 4k disk monitor pre-dated Unix by two years, and similar text
editors were part of the PDP-15 and PDP-11 operating systems from
Digital.  Many of the edito commands that I remember from using ASR-35
connected to my Dad's PDP-8/i are the same as what /bin/ed.
Fortunately people weren't trying to copyright user interfaces back in
the 1960's.....

					- Ted

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[David]

> On Oct 11, 2019, at 8:01 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 09:41:07PM -0500, ricercar@lycos.com wrote:
>> I first started using emacs. I have also grown to appreciate ed, though I
>> learned that quite a bit later.
> 
> If you were on some 300 baud dial up modem, ed made tons of sense.  You
> had a mental picture of the file in your head, you didn't need to see
> all of it in real time, that was wasteful.  ed let you see as much as
> you needed and as little as was productive.  And it worked without 
> termcap.  ed rocks, it's yet another little program that does what
> it needs to do and no more.
> 
> ed was like a lot of stuff that Bell Labs did that dated back to the
> days when getting a print out took a day or so.  pic(1) is a great
> example of that.  I *love* pic because I can look at the input to
> pic and I can see what it will look like.  xfig and friends are 
> not so much.

After using ed and other Unix programs I convinced a member of the
UCSD Pascal project that having a line oriented editor would make sense.
YALOE (Yet Another Line Oriented Editor) was the result. It took almost all
of the commands that ed did and so familiarity with one would allow you to
work with the other.

The simplicity of ed was so nice. One other thing using ed forced me to do
was to keep my files small. Large files would quickly become something you
had to hunt around in. Small files were easier to edit.

	David

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Adam Thornton]

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Now I'm trying to remember if I ever had a single epiphanic a-ha moment.

I don't think I did.  I remember being introduced to Unix the summer before
my senior year of high school, when I was a research intern at a physics
lab at UT Austin.  I learned very little about Unix, but learned how to
drive Emacs inexpertly (I remain pretty mediocre at it thirty years later)
and how to read and post to Usenet.

At Rice, although by my sophomore year I was making beer money as a student
systems programmer on our VM/CMS system, I'd gravitated to the Sun3/60
workstations we had around the place.  And it would have been, I guess, in
the fall of my sophomore year that I started playing around with Linux.  By
the spring, IIRC, I had gotten 4 more MB of discrete DIP RAM (for my
Gateway 2000 386DX/25) and repartitioned my hard disk (65MB RLL, IIRC).

The rest of undergrad life and graduate school I multibooted between
DOS-Windows, OS/2, and Linux, but my primary environment became Linux/X by,
oh, 1997 or so.  It became OS X in the early 2000s (too bad BeOS didn't
make it) but that is (from my perspective as not-a-kernel-developer) just a
BSD with a nice GUI; that's where I've stayed in terms of my favorite
interactive environment.

As far back as 1998 I remember someone saying to me "I've never seen
someone use a GUI as just a collection of terminal windows before."

My graduate advisor was Mike Mahoney, so I strongly suspect I absorbed a
lot of the Way Things Ought To Be from him.  Which is why I guess I feel
like the following principles are basically axioms of how you should design
an operating system:

1) everything's a file, and a file is just an unstructured stream of
bytes.  Device drivers look like files and give you byte streams
2) input on stdin, output on stdout, errors to stderr
3) pipe things that do #2 together to compose complex functionality.
Record semantics are the responsibility of the communicating applications
to know, not the pipeline layer, which just transmits bytes
4) fork() and exec()

I am willing to grudgingly recognize that #4 in particular is not a great
way to create UI-intensive user-facing apps, and that you do need some sort
of threading/lightweight process model to deal with a bunch of asynchronous
interrupt-triggered user interactions.  But for something operating as a
classic transforming filter, which really *is* most computing problems,
those four things do nicely.

Adam

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Jon Forrest]

I was a new grad student at UC Santa Barbara (where I did my
undergrad) in ~1977. Somebody who I had found for my
committee had just returned from a stay at Bell Labs,
and he told me about this thing called Unix. It sounded
very interesting, so I asked around. It turned out that
the Computer Center, where all computing was done back
then, had a PDP11/45 on which they ran RSTS during the
day, and Unix at night.

In fact, somebody had created a sign in one of the
terminal rooms that said

"Oh say can you C by the dawn's early light".

which very accurately described my life back then,
because I was spending many a night learning C,
and was getting used to seeing the dawn's early
light while doing so.

Not exactly an "Aha" moment, but what I learned
from spending these sleepless nights is what
got me started on a career that lasted ~40 years.

Jon Forrest

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Steve Johnson]

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My Aha, Unix! moment was the Unix man pages, especially that they had
a section for BUGS.  The very reality of it attracted me.  As Gloria
Steinem said, "Something doesn't have to be perfect to be
wonderful!"  I notice that on Linux the older man pages still have
BUG sections, but the newer ones don't.  Telling.   Even more
telling is that 'man python' gives you a lot of information, but at
the end where the Bugs section used to be is a section labled
"LICENSING"... 

I did have the opportunity in the early years to demonstrate Unix to
several dozen people, mostly users of the (IBM) mainframe computers
and the GE/Honeywell Time Sharing System.  The sequence that
initiated gasps, confusion, and ultimately joy was:
%  echo hello joe > hijoe
% cat hijoe
hello joe

At the time, permanent file storage was a relatively new concept for
mainframes, and the implementations were very influenced by space
constraints and punched card images.  The IBM was worst, because for
them a disc file was made to look like a tape drive -- "records" that
had multiple card images on them."  In order to create a file, you
had to submit a job (punched cards again) using a Job Control Language
whose authors are hopefully all burning in hell at this very moment. 
And the job failed if the file was already there, ...   The time
sharing system was not much better -- still had the notion of card
images in mind, but also an initial size, a maximum size, and a lot of
settings for who could do what with the file.  In the time sharing
system, a special subsystem took control and asked you roughly a dozen
questions, one at a time.   It was quite common to botch one or more
of the answers, in which case you got to answer all the questions
again.  No wonder when the file was finally created, the system
replied "Successful!".

Typing the above created shock and awe followed by questions like
"what's the blocking factor" and "what device is it allocated on". 
Followed, mostly, by a dazed joy as they finally got it...

Steve

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jon Forrest" <nobozo@gmail.com>
To:<tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Cc:
Sent:Sat, 12 Oct 2019 12:10:12 -0700
Subject:Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

 I was a new grad student at UC Santa Barbara (where I did my
 undergrad) in ~1977. Somebody who I had found for my
 committee had just returned from a stay at Bell Labs,
 and he told me about this thing called Unix. It sounded
 very interesting, so I asked around. It turned out that
 the Computer Center, where all computing was done back
 then, had a PDP11/45 on which they ran RSTS during the
 day, and Unix at night.

 In fact, somebody had created a sign in one of the
 terminal rooms that said

 "Oh say can you C by the dawn's early light".

 which very accurately described my life back then,
 because I was spending many a night learning C,
 and was getting used to seeing the dawn's early
 light while doing so.

 Not exactly an "Aha" moment, but what I learned
 from spending these sleepless nights is what
 got me started on a career that lasted ~40 years.

 Jon Forrest



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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Jon Forrest]

On 10/13/2019 2:45 PM, Steve Johnson wrote:
> 

> I did have the opportunity in the early years to demonstrate Unix to 
> several dozen people, mostly users of the (IBM) mainframe computers and 
> the GE/Honeywell Time Sharing System.  The sequence that initiated 
> gasps, confusion, and ultimately joy was:
> %  echo hello joe > hijoe
> % cat hijoe
> hello joe

A technically equivalent but more dramatic version of this
that I used to use back then was a shell script that would
prompt for the name of a file to display, and then display the
file whose name the user entered.

This would make steam come out of the ears of the IBM mainframe
people because it wasn't possible to do that on the IBM mainframe
in use at the time.

Jon

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Lawrence Stewart]

With JCL it is as easy to read one tape as it is to read 1000 tapes.

> On 2019, Oct 13, at 8:36 PM, Jon Forrest <nobozo@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 10/13/2019 2:45 PM, Steve Johnson wrote:
> 
>> I did have the opportunity in the early years to demonstrate Unix to several dozen people, mostly users of the (IBM) mainframe computers and the GE/Honeywell Time Sharing System.  The sequence that initiated gasps, confusion, and ultimately joy was:
>> %  echo hello joe > hijoe
>> % cat hijoe
>> hello joe
> 
> A technically equivalent but more dramatic version of this
> that I used to use back then was a shell script that would
> prompt for the name of a file to display, and then display the
> file whose name the user entered.
> 
> This would make steam come out of the ears of the IBM mainframe
> people because it wasn't possible to do that on the IBM mainframe
> in use at the time.
> 
> Jon
> 
> 
> 

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Pierre DAVID]

On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 02:45:37PM -0700, Steve Johnson wrote:
>
>
>My Aha, Unix! moment was the Unix man pages, especially that they had
>a section for BUGS.  The very reality of it attracted me.  As Gloria
>Steinem said, "Something doesn't have to be perfect to be
>wonderful!"  I notice that on Linux the older man pages still have
>BUG sections, but the newer ones don't.  Telling.   Even more
>telling is that 'man python' gives you a lot of information, but at
>the end where the Bugs section used to be is a section labled
>"LICENSING"...
>
>I did have the opportunity in the early years to demonstrate Unix to
>several dozen people, mostly users of the (IBM) mainframe computers
>and the GE/Honeywell Time Sharing System.  The sequence that
>initiated gasps, confusion, and ultimately joy was:
>%  echo hello joe > hijoe
>% cat hijoe
>hello joe
>

Coming from a Multics background, my first view of Unix (sort of 
v7 ported to a Bull Mini6) was more like a rant: "cwd" on Multics 
has been renamed to a more cryptic "cd" on Unix, these guys have 
done worse!

The Aha! came when I realized that redirections were so simple...  

Pierre

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Richard Salz]

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My first Unix-related AHA moment was working through the sample code in the
BSD 4.1c networking tutorial and having two unrelated processes that I
wrote communicate.  Without a pipe!  (I'd already used Unix for a few years
and didn't think twice, it was just a natural fit.  But sockets, woah.)

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2019 at 11:23:21PM -0400, Richard Salz wrote:
> My first Unix-related AHA moment was working through the sample code in the
> BSD 4.1c networking tutorial and having two unrelated processes that I
> wrote communicate.  Without a pipe!  (I'd already used Unix for a few years
> and didn't think twice, it was just a natural fit.  But sockets, woah.)

Sockets woah indeed.  Shout out to Clem and the Masscomp doc people because
they, not UW Madison that was doing all sorts of good work, the Masscomp 
docs got me to understand sockets.

Richard, I get it, it is a light bulb moment when you realize that
you can get two unrelated processes talk to each other.  It bumps your
understanding of what is possible.  Which today seems lame, there is so
much, but I get it, back then that was huge.

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Richard Salz wrote in <CAFH29tq=Mfk9RQNchoT+a7XzR3+qpUuBZA9_Mr1OL7RAYFW_\
Xw@mail.gmail.com>:
 |My first Unix-related AHA moment was working through the sample code \
 |in the BSD 4.1c networking tutorial and having two unrelated processes \
 |that I wrote communicate.  Without a pipe!  (I'd already used 
 |Unix for a few years and didn't think twice, it was just a natural \
 |fit.  But sockets, woah.)

Oh yes, and having a single-threaded HTTP server which could serve
small static files to hundreds (128) of (test) clients concurrently
on a Cyrix 166, simply by using non-blocking I/O and select(2)
(through event driven C++ objects).

(And by that time i think / seem to recall from computer magazine
article JAVA implemented such I/O / xy monitors by creating
a thread of execution, and the select(2) Cygwin code that i have
seen was _so_ complicated and expensive, it was a real Aha!, just
like in Kate Bush's "Wow".)

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Wesley Parish]

I don't really think I had an "Aha" moment as such. More a set of
them, after discovering computers again after failing to understand
them at high school - I blame Apple BASIC for that.

I think it was discovering two articles on Minix (also discussing the
Minix book) and Coherent in a local computer magazine, and of course
that Unix came with source was mentioned. So I bought the Minix book,
then when I could, I did a Unix course at the local polytech (SCO of
some description c. early 90s) and got the SLS Linux that now resides
in the Bochs area at Sourceforge.

It wasn't instantaneous, but more of a build-up - this stuff is
powerful and just works. Even better, you can read the source files
and get to understand everything about it - so you're not in a "cargo
cult" attitude to operating systems and applications: everything is in
your hands and you can go in as deeply as you wish. You just have to
be willing to work at learning it.

My 0.02c worth - don't spend it all at once!!! :)

Wesley Parish
On 10/11/19, 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
>

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Naveen Nathan]

My aha moment was implementing a bourne-like shell for
a Unix & C course I took in uni.

We were given about 3 weeks to implement the shell from
scratch with a lot of bonus points up for grabs such as
using lex/yacc for parsing, supporting more than one pipe
in a pipeline, backgrounding jobs, advanced i/o redirection,
etc.

It was quite fun, and we got to sort of "prove" how the Unix
shell works and how the fundamental interfaces behave.

- Naveen

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[markus schnalke]

Hoi,

my Aha moments were (in no particular order):

- Users can change their login shell! -- This surely was the most
  impressing discovery for me.

- Users are regarded as programmers and are provided with
  structurally all possiblities, i.e. you can recreate the whole
  system to your preferences within your home directory and use
  that as the default.

- The shell as a fluid way from dumb programm calling to full
  programming, where any user can float up and down the level,
  based on personal skills and the problem at hand.

- Chroot (Linux from Scratch)

- To me it's actually more a philosophy behind it all, and UNIX
  itself ist more a demonstration and the scientific experiment
  that helped to uncover and shape this philosophy. The Aha moment
  was that there is so much behind it.

- Those guys implemented about anything there is about an
  operating system and application tools, and -- what is even
  more impressive -- in each of those fields (typesetting, fonts,
  chess, languages, and so on for a long time), they went deep
  and invented there as well. Such a small group and so hugely
  much and deep output!


meillo

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Michael Kjörling]

On 11 Oct 2019 06:55 +1000, from wkt@tuhs.org (Warren Toomey):
> What was your "ahah" moment when you
> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd
> previously used?

My Unix moment wasn't anywhere near as distinct as some other
peoples'. It was rather very much a gradual process.

I got Internet access of my own as I recall some time in 1996. (I'd
got a modem only a year or so earlier.) I definitely had Internet
access and my own e-mail address in mid-1996.

At that time, having had problems installing Windows 95 on top of
3.1x, I believe I was still running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on
MS-DOS.

Before I figured out how to get Trumpet Winsock to talk to my ISP (it
probably would have gone more easily if not for the fact that due to
still young age at the time and English not being my native language I
was rather Englishtically challenged), that meant dial-up and log in
to my ISP's Unix systems, which I mainly used to send and receive
e-mail using Pine (which I _was_ able to figure out how to use).

Looking back today at some of the e-mails from around that time, I'm
guessing that system ran Solaris; the message-IDs from the oldest
e-mails I still have clearly indicate "Pine.SOL.3.92" but a quick web
search for what SOL meant to Pine turned out to be rather unhelpful.

Also somewhere around that same time, someone first introduced me to
Linux, but the two of us just weren't ready for each other at the
time. I dipped my toes twice before taking the plunge to using Linux
(then Red Hat 6.2) as my main desktop OS some time in mid-2000. Even
then it took a while to get used to, but on the whole, here I am
almost two decades later, not looking back... (though I do have to use
Windows at work.)

-- 
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael@kjorling.se
  “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person
              is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor)

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Gregg Levine]

Hello!
Actually Michael you're not alone in the problems regarding Trumpet
Windsock. I spent an exhaustive summer several years ago trying to get
it to work. And that was on my backup machine. I did get Win95 to
install onto Win3.11 without a problem. It only seems hard.

By time the string of events that I described above happened within
the Linux world, well that's where I am now.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."

On Sat, Oct 12, 2019 at 3:34 PM Michael Kjörling <michael@kjorling.se> wrote:
>
> On 11 Oct 2019 06:55 +1000, from wkt@tuhs.org (Warren Toomey):
> > What was your "ahah" moment when you
> > first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems you'd
> > previously used?
>
> My Unix moment wasn't anywhere near as distinct as some other
> peoples'. It was rather very much a gradual process.
>
> I got Internet access of my own as I recall some time in 1996. (I'd
> got a modem only a year or so earlier.) I definitely had Internet
> access and my own e-mail address in mid-1996.
>
> At that time, having had problems installing Windows 95 on top of
> 3.1x, I believe I was still running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on
> MS-DOS.
>
> Before I figured out how to get Trumpet Winsock to talk to my ISP (it
> probably would have gone more easily if not for the fact that due to
> still young age at the time and English not being my native language I
> was rather Englishtically challenged), that meant dial-up and log in
> to my ISP's Unix systems, which I mainly used to send and receive
> e-mail using Pine (which I _was_ able to figure out how to use).
>
> Looking back today at some of the e-mails from around that time, I'm
> guessing that system ran Solaris; the message-IDs from the oldest
> e-mails I still have clearly indicate "Pine.SOL.3.92" but a quick web
> search for what SOL meant to Pine turned out to be rather unhelpful.
>
> Also somewhere around that same time, someone first introduced me to
> Linux, but the two of us just weren't ready for each other at the
> time. I dipped my toes twice before taking the plunge to using Linux
> (then Red Hat 6.2) as my main desktop OS some time in mid-2000. Even
> then it took a while to get used to, but on the whole, here I am
> almost two decades later, not looking back... (though I do have to use
> Windows at work.)
>
> --
> Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael@kjorling.se
>   “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person
>               is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor)
>

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Dan Cross]

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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.
>

I'm afraid I have a rather pedestrian story. Like many folks in the 80s, we
had a home computer, and in early high school I got kind of hooked on this
idea of using a modem to call other computers. I remember one of the kids
at school telling me, "don't use DOS unless you're afraid of speed." At the
time, I had no real conception of what that meant, nor how fundamentally
wrong it was, but hey, ok. Our home machine was actually a Mac, but I
managed to convince the family that a PC clone running DOS would be a
better machine.

Dad relented, a suitable machine was acquired and while it is likely the
thing would have become another object gather dust, an unfortunate
encounter with a solid object at a high rate of speed basically ended my
changes of becoming a professional skateboarder and the (new) computer
filled the void. As I was recuperating from that broken collar bone, I got
into the idea of learning C.

My dad, an engineer, mentioned to me that the folks at his company were
using Sun machines and the word "Unix" hung in the air. It was mysterious
and cool. Eventually, I saved up enough money to order a copy of Coherent,
which while interesting, was abstruse and opaque: let's face it, DOS was
written to drive what amounted to souped up microcontrollers; things were
pretty understandable in that world once you achieved a basic level of
competence. But this Unix thing sounded intriguing and I wanted to learn
more. Getting access was a challenge. Coherent didn't really seem like the
thing.

About a year of DOS and some Coherent later, I fell in with a crowd of
undergrads at the local university who were mostly CS/EE/Math majors and
that cemented things: it pains me somewhat to admit it, but I got into Unix
because that's what the cool kids were doing. I ditched DOS and Coherent
and installed NetBSD. Interestingly, I found a Linux distribution
somewhere, and we had that running in a lab for a while, but it didn't
stick; I still thought BSD was better and at the time, that was probably
(technically) true. Besides, we were mostly running RISC machines running
various commercial Unix variants; the BSD/Linux stuff was just for messing
around and/or for home use.

The one unique quirk in this anecdote is that, at some point, I did two
weird things: 1) I saw an ad locally for a guy selling a DECstation running
Ultrix and I bought it. I could never get X to work on my 486, but it sure
worked on the DECstation, so I had a graphical environment at home. 2) I
bought a VAX off USENET. Not a "real" VAX in the 10th edition sense, but a
desktop VAXstation. I ran VMS on that. Both of those machines are probably
still down in my basement somewhere.... Anyway, while the kids were running
Linux at home, most people I knew really wanted a RISC workstation and I
had one as well as a personal VAX. That definitely gave me some street cred
for a while.

At some point I had learned enough technically to realize that Unix really
was better than the alternatives I had access to; I liked VMS, but it was
specific to a limited set of hardware and seemed more complex than Unix for
little benefit. Some people claimed it was simpler, though; I'm not sure in
what sense they meant, even today. Some of the college folks I was spending
time with used the local mainframe (VM/ESA) a fair bit and RSCS was a big
deal locally. I played around with it, but never found it all that
interesting; it seemed to me that Unix did everything the mainframe could
do, but, well, better.

So yeah, that's it: it's kind of sad, but I ran Unix because people told me
Unix was better. And while on the one hand it was obviously better than
DOS, I had limited exposure to other systems from which to form a real
opinion about its relative merits with respect to similarly ambitious
designs. I see now the superiority of the design relative to other common
systems of the day, but that's a perspective developed after the fact, as
opposed to something that I saw or felt at the time.

One more aside here: Doug lambasted the Macintosh earlier, but in
retrospect I'm really glad that our first computer was a Mac. It was never
a machine that was designed for command-line use; hence why something was
simple as "Hello, World!" would be so complex. But it did have a regularity
of interface and was simple enough that for years I never realized a
computer could be any different. I didn't appreciate the value of those
early lessons and how they shaped how I thought about how a system should
work until much, much  later.

        - Dan C.

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Robert Brockway]

On Fri, 11 Oct 2019, Warren Toomey wrote:

> All, we had another dozen TUHS suscribers to the list overnight. Welcome.

Well I've been on this list for 13 years (just checked) but I'll jump in.
I've mostly lurked with probably less than 13 comments total.

> 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?

I had run Microware OS-9 as a teenager which is somewhat Unix like so some 
commands were familiar to me from the outset, but my Unix ahah moment is 
almost embarrassingly simple.

I was trying to arrange to meet with a fellow student during 2nd year at 
University to work on a project.  It was 1992 so neither of us had a 
calendar readily available.  I turned to the dumbterm in front of me and 
said "If Unix had a calendar command I think it would be 'cal'".  I typed 
cal and when it worked I realised I found Unix so much more intuitive than 
other OSes I had used in the past.

I used Unix at university for the next couple of years, installed Linux at 
home in 1994 and a year later I founded a Unix user group[1].  At the 
first meeting I hoped we wouldn't run out of things to talk about.  I had 
a lot to learn.

[1] Which is still going to this day.  http://www.humbug.org.au.

Rob

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[arnold]

Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote:

> 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?

I first met Unix in the fall of 1980, after a two-year hiatus from
college. Up to then, I'd only used Sperry Univac mainframes and a
weird Xerox computer (only a little) and punch cards on an IBM 1130.

In the interim, the college gave the undergrads access to a PDP-11/70
at the med school running IS/1 - Interactive Systems' commercial version
of V6.  No access for us to source code, though. :-(

I/O redirection and space separated arguments were really cool, as well
as pipelines. Light years ahead of anything else.

More or less simultaneously, someone lent me their copies of "Software Tools"
and "The C Programming Language" (which I immediately got my own copies
of). Software Tools opened my eyes to the whole Unix philosophy.

K&R was so dense that my head was swimming after the first read.  I then
read it through again, and everything pretty much clicked.

I decided pretty quickly during the course of that first year with Unix
that I only wanted to work with C and Unix. Both were so far ahead of
everything else...

Arnold

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Larry McVoy]

On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 09:33:09AM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> K&R was so dense that my head was swimming after the first read.  I then
> read it through again, and everything pretty much clicked.

Agreed, it's an awesome book.  All the stuff you need is there and there
is no fluff.  I suspect people will still be reading that book 50 years
from now.

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[David Potesta]

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I just bought my first copy about 3 months ago.

On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 10:42 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 09:33:09AM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > K&R was so dense that my head was swimming after the first read.  I then
> > read it through again, and everything pretty much clicked.
>
> Agreed, it's an awesome book.  All the stuff you need is there and there
> is no fluff.  I suspect people will still be reading that book 50 years
> from now.
>

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 11 Oct 2019, Warren Toomey 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?

When I discovered that there was nothing special about the Shell i.e. I 
could write/modify it, as it was not privileged in any way (unlike, cough 
cough, DCL etc).

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Ronald Natalie]

Indeed, the shell and just about any command (save a few setuid ones) were just programs that you could just as soon have your own copies of.
that was always very neat coming from more “canned” systems.


> On Oct 17, 2019, at 8:49 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 11 Oct 2019, Warren Toomey 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?
> 
> When I discovered that there was nothing special about the Shell i.e. I could write/modify it, as it was not privileged in any way (unlike, cough cough, DCL etc).
> 
> -- Dave

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Dario Niedermann]

Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote:

> [...] What was your "ahah" moment when you
> first saw that Unix was special, especially compared to the systems
> you'd previously used?

Not particularly serious, but still enlightening, was the first time
I did:

	cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp

on Linux and had white noise come out of the speaker. It was one of the
first things that made me realize how far the "everything is a file"
concept can be taken.

OK, Unix-like moment.

-- 
Dario Niedermann.                 Also on the Internet at:

gopher://darioniedermann.it/  <>  https://www.darioniedermann.it/

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Gilles Gravier]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1364 bytes --]

Hi!

Mine was more of an "oh oh" moment... when, back in 1994, I needed to clean
up /tmp on the company Data General Aviion that I was administering... and
I typed "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*"

Notice the involuntary space between /tmp and /* ... hence the "oh oh..."
moment when I started seeing this take long... and when I typed Ctrl-C and
started seeing some things like "/bin/ls not found" when I looked for the
files in / ...

Gilles

Le ven. 11 oct. 2019 à 00:55, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> a écrit :

> 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
>


-- 
*Gilles Gravier*  - Gilles@Gravier.org
GSM : +33618347147 and +41794728437
Skype : ggravier | PGP Key : 0xA610DB098DE6D026
<http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=0xA610DB098DE6D026&op=index>

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Adam Thornton]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4974 bytes --]

I can't remember an epiphanal "a-ha!" moment.

I remember that by 1999 I had migrated from OS/2 to Linux as my primary
computing environment, and I've never really left; I ran Linux for a bunch
of years, and then slid over to OS X, where I've mostly remained--the host
OS on most of the modern stuff I own is either OS X or Linux, with other
Unixes usually running under emulation (I have a NeXTStation and three
Sparc machines of varying vintage, all running period-appropriate Unixes,
when I fire them up, but they don't stay running; the MicroVAX comes
frustratingly close to running but doesn't quite, and I haven't even
powered up the VAX 11/730 I got a couple months ago to see how close it is
to usable).  Turning back the clock farther...

In 1998 I remember someone saying, with a mixture of awe and horror, "I've
never seen anyone use a GUI as just a place to stash a bunch of terminal
windows before."  I also remember screwing with dialup scripts to run PPP
on my Linux machine at home, which must have been '96 or so?  So that early
I was clearly living in it at least enough that I didn't want to leave to
fire up another OS (although I also remember learning far too much about
PPP on OS/2), and spending enough time connected to the Internet that I
wanted a network stack running all the time.

I remember Cygwin on NT and ... EMX, I think it was? ... to let me use and
build Unixy-feeling things on NT and OS/2 respectively, which suggests that
while I was still using them in the mid-to-late 90s I kinda hated them.
(That's not quite fair; OS/2 had some nice points.)

In 1992 or 1993 I remember fiddling with definitions inside kernel include
files to make my soundcard, my parallel port, and my modem all work at the
same time (again on Linux), and not finding that a big deal (I had some
nonstandard IRQs set up to get everything to play nice together, IIRC).  I
guess that was also about when I was hand-editing my partition table to
multiboot a 386DX/25 of my very own so it could run Linux and DOS/Win3.11
off the same drive.

I remember some very early Linux experiences (late '91 or early '92) as my
first exposure to bash (the Sun workstations at school ran SunOS and my
environment, at least, was csh, which was certainly less unpleasant than
/bin/sh) and realizing how vastly much more I liked using bash than csh, as
well as the difficulty my muscle memory had transitioning from
esc-completion to tab-completion.  I remember that I didn't really speak C
at that point.  Though come to think of it I didn't really get _fluent_ at
C until the late-ish 90s.

The first Unix system I used was something, probably Xenix, on a Dell '386
in a physics lab at UT Austin in the summer of '89, and while I didn't
really "get" Unix at that point, I knew I liked it better than DOS, and it
let me access Usenet, which was a huge deal.  That was the same summer and
same lab where I discovered the flight simulator on the SGI IRIS.  I'm sure
that hardware was expensive and used to do complex nonlinear dynamic
simulations for people, but it was also certainly used for flying pretend
planes in what seemed then like an astonishingly realistically rendered 3-D
world.  That summer was when I made the choice between Emacs and vi, and
that choice has stuck with me for 30 years.  In two more years the core of
my .emacs file (which I inherited, obviously) will be old enough to be
president.

Adam

On Tue, Oct 22, 2019 at 10:14 PM Gilles Gravier <gilles@gravier.org> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Mine was more of an "oh oh" moment... when, back in 1994, I needed to
> clean up /tmp on the company Data General Aviion that I was
> administering... and I typed "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*"
>
> Notice the involuntary space between /tmp and /* ... hence the "oh oh..."
> moment when I started seeing this take long... and when I typed Ctrl-C and
> started seeing some things like "/bin/ls not found" when I looked for the
> files in / ...
>
> Gilles
>
> Le ven. 11 oct. 2019 à 00:55, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> a écrit :
>
>> 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
>>
>
>
> --
> *Gilles Gravier*  - Gilles@Gravier.org
> GSM : +33618347147 and +41794728437
> Skype : ggravier | PGP Key : 0xA610DB098DE6D026
> <http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=0xA610DB098DE6D026&op=index>
>

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Arthur Krewat]

More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;)

On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote:
> "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*"

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Larry McVoy]

I posted a "paper" here about how to recover from that on a Masscomp
so yeah, guilty as well.  It was a learning experience.

On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 11:08:57AM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;)
> 
> On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote:
> >"sudo rm -rf /tmp /*"

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Arrigo Triulzi]

I had posted a question on sys.unix.wizards about this a long long time ago when in academia. The gist of it was: “when does the system die after issuing the lethal command?”

We tested on a limited number of systems (Linux with kernel around 1.0, SunOS 4.1.4, SGI Irix and both DEC OSF/1 and Ultrix) but I lost the results :(

> On 23 Oct 2019, at 17:11, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> I posted a "paper" here about how to recover from that on a Masscomp
> so yeah, guilty as well.  It was a learning experience.
> 
> On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 11:08:57AM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote:
>> More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;)
>> 
>> On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote:
>>> "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*"
> 
> -- 
> ---
> Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Dan Cross]

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On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 11:26 AM Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo@alchemistowl.org>
wrote:

> I had posted a question on sys.unix.wizards about this a long long time
> ago when in academia. The gist of it was: “when does the system die after
> issuing the lethal command?”
>
> We tested on a limited number of systems (Linux with kernel around 1.0,
> SunOS 4.1.4, SGI Irix and both DEC OSF/1 and Ultrix) but I lost the results
> :(
>

The irony....

        - Dan C.

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Arthur Krewat]

Laugh out loud moment of the day...

On 10/23/2019 11:33 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
>
> The irony....
>
>         - Dan C.

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Richard Salz]

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I turned it into a reflex tester:
   trap "ls | wc ; exit" 1 2 3 15
   echo go... `ls | wc`
   rm -f *

And I got a prize at Usenix for it.

On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 11:09 AM Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote:

> More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;)
>
> On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote:
> > "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*"
>
>

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Arrigo Triulzi]

On 23 Oct 2019, at 17:17, Richard Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I turned it into a reflex tester:
>    trap "ls | wc ; exit" 1 2 3 15
>    echo go... `ls | wc`
>    rm -f *
> 
> And I got a prize at Usenix for it.

I assume this was tested both on personal and work systems to see if the reflex speed changed?

Arrigo

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Will Senn]

On 10/23/19 10:08 AM, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;)
>
> On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote:
>> "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*"
>
Oh yeah. Did something similar on my Powerbook back around Panther:

sudo rm -fr /bin

I heart my Macs (all of 'em), it was just a matter of copying back the 
bin directory or reinstalling over the existing files or grabbing the 
timemachine copy or somesuch... whatever it was, it was 20 minutes of 
frustration, then all good. Try that on linux... no, don't :), unless 
you're doing timeshift or something similar and just wanna have some fun.

Will


-- 
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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Adam Thornton]

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_These_ days on the Mac, the root filesystem is mounted ro with some cute
overmounting tricks such that everything mutable in normal operations lives
in /System/Volumes/Data.  I presume updates take the form of booting into
single-user-mode and running a script to remount rw and copy, but I haven't
actually looked into it.

Adam

On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 9:45 AM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10/23/19 10:08 AM, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> > More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;)
> >
> > On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote:
> >> "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*"
> >
> Oh yeah. Did something similar on my Powerbook back around Panther:
>
> sudo rm -fr /bin
>
> I heart my Macs (all of 'em), it was just a matter of copying back the
> bin directory or reinstalling over the existing files or grabbing the
> timemachine copy or somesuch... whatever it was, it was 20 minutes of
> frustration, then all good. Try that on linux... no, don't :), unless
> you're doing timeshift or something similar and just wanna have some fun.
>
> Will
>
>
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>
>

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS]

Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> writes:

> Try that on linux... no, don't :)

We accidentally totally hosed a Linux system running MySQL a dozen or so
years back.  Redhat, and pretty much "rpm -qa | xargs rpm -e".  Totally
destroyed the ability to do anything at all on that box, of course, even
using the logged-in shell that caused the damage.  We set up a new host,
replicated the running database across, and retired the original.  No
down time, no data loss.  :)

-tih
-- 
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
of Lisp.  Lisp is the most important idea in computer science.  --Alan Kay

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 23 Oct 2019, Arthur Krewat wrote:

> More than one of us have done that in our lifetime ;)
>
> On 10/23/2019 1:13 AM, Gilles Gravier wrote:
>> "sudo rm -rf /tmp /*"

It's almot becomea rite of passage :-)

-- Dave

Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[John S Quarterman]

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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
>

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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[Will Senn]

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On 10/25/19 3:58 PM, John S Quarterman wrote:
> 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 
> <mailto: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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Re: [TUHS] What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?

[William Corcoran]

The year was 1986.  Top Gun was in the theaters. Lionel Ritchie was belting out “Say you, say me” on serious overplay.  

I was working on the coolest machine I ever saw.  The Motorola S290. Initially, we had System III and eventually System V.   At the time, I learned MS DOS months before I was exposed to UNIX.   I could not understand how a new small Motorola UNIX Super-microcomputer  could have such an extensive set of documentation.  I had to read these huge books to learn this same system could run computers from DEC and others.  These UNIX books were so extensive and I found there were two ways to use UNIX:  (1) sign on to the system at at work; or, (2) sign on to the system in my imagination.   Both were equally as fun.  

The Motorola S290 had a small DPU tower called Data Processing Unit and several other similar shaped small towers linked by a SCSI bus that housed 5.25” devices of the day.  This included 50MB hard disks, Wangtek Streaming Tape Drive.

Yes! You could mount a streaming tape as a block device!  It would “shoe shine” the tape heads if you “cd” into a formatted tape.  It was not practical as a block device, but it worked.  

The Motorola S290 DPU ran a primary operating system called ISOS. It was UNIX like. But not UNIX.  Boot disks had to have an ISOS partition and a UNIX partition.  

The Motorola S290 would first boot ISOS.  Then, UNIX would start afterwards.

ISOS has similar UNIX commands like “cd”, “ls”, and “ps”

After working in a UNIX shell one day, I signed on to ISOS.   I wanted to understand how UNIX integrated with ISOS. 

What blew my 1986 kid mind: After signing on to ISOS, I did a “ps”

PID  PPID  ...   COMMAND
123   2               “/UNIX”

Aha UNIX!   UNIX was a process running under ISOS!

Bill Corcoran 


> On 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