[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 at nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA