It was man pages that first caught my eye, placing me on a life-long path of working

with Unix and its derivatives.

I was working on a project for a telephone company, converting IBM 2780 Bisync to

async, and was given a manual and root access to a Xenix machine.  I had cut my

teeth on a Radio Shack TRS-80 and knew BASIC and Z80 machine code.

The machine had BASIC, so that is where I started.  I had spent an afternoon

writing a hex dump program before I discovered "od".  I spent the next day reading

all the man pages.  I was amazed with their simplicity and clarity.

Having finished the man pages, I read the Unix Programmer's Manual cover to cover.

I re-wrote the hex dump in C just for fun.  I was sold.

The remarkable simplicity of Unix, the kernel, the commands, the documentation,

is a beautiful thing.  And I was fortunate to have found it early in my career.

It was also a time, when the manuals were concise enough to read them all

in a few day's time.