Unix was at first a quite different experience, I think. The Bell Labs Unix had only a few utilities, each one was simple, and the documentation was good. There

Unix was at first a quite different experience, I think. The Bell Labs Unix had only a few utilities, each one was simple, and the documentation was good. There's a nice relevant quote: "Cat went to Berkeley, came back waving flags." It's about how the commands (even cat) got many additional options after third parties got their hands on them (or reimplemented them). There are manuals for old Unix versions here, maybe start with V7 if interested: http://man.cat-v.org http://man.cat-v.org The paper "Program design in the UNIX environment" or the book "The UNIX Programming Environment", both by Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan, might be of interest.