[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 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."

On Sat, Oct 12, 2019 at 3:34 PM Michael Kjörling <michael at kjorling.se> wrote:
>
> On 11 Oct 2019 06:55 +1000, from wkt at 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 at 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)
>