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

[Ken Thompson]

i was writing the small utilities for the first
pdp-11 unix. (rm ls date ....)

so, cd was next.

% pwd
/usr/ken
% cd /tmp
% pwd
/usr/ken

Aha!

On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 1:12 PM Sean Dwyer <ewe2 at ewe2.ninja> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 03:25:52PM -0400, Norman Wilson wrote:
> > That's more or less what it was like to me.  Not so much
> > an aha! moment, more just a feeling of coming home.  It
> > took a while to understand the different way things worked
> > in UNIX (I had previously used TOPS-10 for several years)
> > but as it all sank in it felt more and more right.
>
> Up to my 30s I had only vaguely known about computers, it definitely wasn't my
> thing, I was a musician. But one day I found myself buying a $3k Packard Bell
> 486, learnt DOS and began buying CD-ROMS with software often taken straight
> off the big ftp sites. That is how I discovered Unix and how much better than
> DOS it was. Within a year (1994) I was running my own Linux system. There was
> a lot of stuff being ported from Solaris and the BSDs and I was learning C
> just to build utilities I wanted, but if there was a 'killer app' for me that
> was the aha! moment, it was a close contest between adventure and ching.
>
> The odd thing was that adventure was certainly playable, but ching only
> existed as a weird hybrid of shell script and two C programs and used some
> kind of manpage macros and I didn't understand why but I loved it. That was my
> introduction really to the Unix tools philosophy and suddenly the way my Linux
> system worked made sense. Being also a history buff I wanted to know how this
> all happened and that led to Don Libes and Life With Unix and my fate was
> sealed.
>
> --
> I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise as they fly by.