4 ms·

> The first thing I did was to read the entire Wikipedia page on UNIX. I also read this original paper written by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson from 1974 We

by dakna 6y ago

> The first thing I did was to read the entire Wikipedia page on UNIX. I also read this original paper written by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson from 1974 We need more people like you. Kudos for having the attention span to do this. Enjoy your HN top spot, well deserved.

RicoElectrico 6y ago
I find good Wikipedia articles with competent copy-editing, pure fact and no nonsense to be a good read - at least much more so that many pseudo-intellectually-sounding articles from a few outlets that get posted on HN regularly.
- moehm 6y ago
  If you find yourself one day without a good Wikipedia article to read, I collect (good) articles and their respective discussions posted on HN here: https://www.mostdiscussed.com/ https://www.mostdiscussed.com/
  - dakna 6y ago
    Nice work combining the two sources, saved!
segmondy 6y ago
When I got into Unix in the 90's, the first thing I did was read all the man page for every command and tried to run as many of them as I could with as many options. Decades later it still pays off. If you want to get good at sometime, just dive in.
- carltheperson 6y ago
  Interesting how Unix/Linux knowledge stays relevant for so long. It feels like a lot of tech knowledge today gets obsolete every few years.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    It does, and my own decision to pursue Linux (in the mid-1990s) was based in large part on seeing multiple cases of earlier proprietary tech knowledge (CPM, DOS, classic Mac, MVS TSO/ISPF, VMS, MS Windows) either be made obsolete or limited to specific hardware or system vendors. By contrast, Unix, in its BSD and GNU variants, was vendow and hardware independent, and by the mid 1990s, Linux was pretty clearly its successor. Editor / word-processing tools have been especially telling. I've used and often been expert at: DOS Edit, EDT and EVE (both VMS), MacWrite, Wordperfect, Wordstar, MS Word, AmiPro, Notepad, MS Write, Aplixware (an early Linux office suite), and multiple variants of Libreoffice (StarOffice, OpenOffice, NeoOffice, ...). And then there's vi/vim, which I first cut my teeth on in the mid-1980s, and which I still use daily and learn new features and uses of all the time (some themselves new, often long-time capabilities). That's been an extraordinarily durable learning investment. (Emacs similarly so.) Awk's another basic tool that's quite useful and ubiquitously available. There have been hitches and inconsistencies: hardware changes invalidate old concepts (shutdown sequences as noted here), firewall, audio, and other subsystems have changed dramatically and multiple times. Physical vs. cloud server management is a very differrent head. Systemd is a major (and often disturbing) development. Generally, though, the further you stay from GUI and vendor-specific tools, the more durable the knowledge. My preferred desktop environment is based on the 1980s NeXT and has remained almost wholly unchanged since the mid-1990s whilst GNOME and KDE underwent multiple revolutions and Xfce4 came into being. Windowmaker still does things none of the other three can touch, and my muscle-memory is well into its third decade. As you get older, learning slows, but it's forgetting which becomes especially hard. Durable, incrementally-evolving tools minimise that pain remarkably.
mistoffelees 6y ago
That level of attention span is incomprehensible to me!
- GreenWatermelon 6y ago
  Especially when you add Anxiety to the mix. I may know exactly what I should do and how I should go about it, but when it comes to doing I face an illogical amount of stress, so I elect to distract myself.

by dakna 6y ago

RicoElectrico 6y ago

I find good Wikipedia articles with competent copy-editing, pure fact and no nonsense to be a good read - at least much more so that many pseudo-intellectually-sounding articles from a few outlets that get posted on HN regularly.

moehm 6y ago
If you find yourself one day without a good Wikipedia article to read, I collect (good) articles and their respective discussions posted on HN here: https://www.mostdiscussed.com/ https://www.mostdiscussed.com/
- dakna 6y ago
  Nice work combining the two sources, saved!

segmondy 6y ago

When I got into Unix in the 90's, the first thing I did was read all the man page for every command and tried to run as many of them as I could with as many options. Decades later it still pays off. If you want to get good at sometime, just dive in.

carltheperson 6y ago
Interesting how Unix/Linux knowledge stays relevant for so long. It feels like a lot of tech knowledge today gets obsolete every few years.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  It does, and my own decision to pursue Linux (in the mid-1990s) was based in large part on seeing multiple cases of earlier proprietary tech knowledge (CPM, DOS, classic Mac, MVS TSO/ISPF, VMS, MS Windows) either be made obsolete or limited to specific hardware or system vendors. By contrast, Unix, in its BSD and GNU variants, was vendow and hardware independent, and by the mid 1990s, Linux was pretty clearly its successor. Editor / word-processing tools have been especially telling. I've used and often been expert at: DOS Edit, EDT and EVE (both VMS), MacWrite, Wordperfect, Wordstar, MS Word, AmiPro, Notepad, MS Write, Aplixware (an early Linux office suite), and multiple variants of Libreoffice (StarOffice, OpenOffice, NeoOffice, ...). And then there's vi/vim, which I first cut my teeth on in the mid-1980s, and which I still use daily and learn new features and uses of all the time (some themselves new, often long-time capabilities). That's been an extraordinarily durable learning investment. (Emacs similarly so.) Awk's another basic tool that's quite useful and ubiquitously available. There have been hitches and inconsistencies: hardware changes invalidate old concepts (shutdown sequences as noted here), firewall, audio, and other subsystems have changed dramatically and multiple times. Physical vs. cloud server management is a very differrent head. Systemd is a major (and often disturbing) development. Generally, though, the further you stay from GUI and vendor-specific tools, the more durable the knowledge. My preferred desktop environment is based on the 1980s NeXT and has remained almost wholly unchanged since the mid-1990s whilst GNOME and KDE underwent multiple revolutions and Xfce4 came into being. Windowmaker still does things none of the other three can touch, and my muscle-memory is well into its third decade. As you get older, learning slows, but it's forgetting which becomes especially hard. Durable, incrementally-evolving tools minimise that pain remarkably.

mistoffelees 6y ago

That level of attention span is incomprehensible to me!

GreenWatermelon 6y ago
Especially when you add Anxiety to the mix. I may know exactly what I should do and how I should go about it, but when it comes to doing I face an illogical amount of stress, so I elect to distract myself.