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

Steve Nickolas usotsuki at buric.co
Sun Oct 13 00:26:00 AEST 2019


On Sat, 12 Oct 2019, Doug McIlroy wrote:

>> That sounds like Macintosh rather than Apple ][.
>
> You are right. My error. I might add that OS X was
> afforded a different kind of "Aha, Unix!" moment.
>
> Doug
>

For me Unix felt like something that took the best parts of MS-DOS (which 
I was very familiar with) and improved on them - plus I knew / as a path 
separator from ProDOS on the Apple ][ (you can probably see where I'm 
going) ;p.

I later learned that this was because MS-DOS, while it was growing out of 
its "CP/M clone" phase, had pinched a lot of things from Unix and so this 
similarity was not a coincidence.  But what MS-DOS has to fumble around 
with and pretend to do, Unix actually *did*.

Not to mention, it had, like the Apple ][ and unlike MS-DOS, a single 
environment that combined a command shell and a programming language. 
Plus the network transparency.

It was the best of both worlds.

-uso.
Random: One of my laptops' Windows 10 install ate itself due to a bum 
update a couple days ago.  I had left Windows on it when I got it because 
I'd heard that the company's laptops that were not in a specific product 
line would not run Linux properly.  Actually, it was no problem at all, so 
it's running Debian now.  I also have a broken laptop that runs Debian 
headless.  I know it's not the real thing, but it'll suffice me. ;p


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