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

Steffen Nurpmeso steffen at sdaoden.eu
Sun Oct 13 07:32:53 AEST 2019


Richard Salz wrote in <CAFH29tq=Mfk9RQNchoT+a7XzR3+qpUuBZA9_Mr1OL7RAYFW_\
Xw at 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)


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