You can still start in a very similar place. C isn't a bad language, and is far nicer to learn than C++. It'll bite hard if you get things wrong though. Most

You can still start in a very similar place. C isn't a bad language, and is far nicer to learn than C++. It'll bite hard if you get things wrong though. Most of got a start sat at a terminal in front of a BSD or SVR4 flavour Unix, or a BSD Sun Workstation. Never occured to me so much would still exist 25 years later! If you want to understand BSD and all the *nix family "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System" is a great starting point. You'll understand what the kernel is doing, why and how. The earlier version of the book that I've had for years is online ("Design and ... 4.4 BSD OS") at freebsd. I think the online version is complete, but not certain. That and a few other classic nix books, like W Richard Stevens, give a decent grounding. You probably have a harder time replicating being surrounded by semi-benevolent greybeards nudgng your habits in the preferred direction! Early newsgroups were free of spam and full of people to answer. IRC and web came later. Needing to consider security came later too! Reading through BSD code, a lot of the core code is very good, and starting to mess around with simple things like MUDs and simple client server things will put you in a reasonable place. We couldn't just download from web, so had to write a simple in-office chat service, test tools etc. What you won't get easily is the need and desire to minimise memory use, or CPU cycles, or even pack data, so some of the effort just isn't bothered with. Regularly needing to consider that made us naturally wary of being wasteful. In truth I wish some of it were still around when waiting needless time for some app to update some small data from cloud.