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Strangely enough, I did learn Unix by reading all the man pages. My first introduction to a Unix was via 'Coherent', a v7 clone back in the early 1990s. That c

Strangely enough, I did learn Unix by reading all the man pages. My first introduction to a Unix was via 'Coherent', a v7 clone back in the early 1990s. That came with a huge book. That huge book was pretty much a chapter or two on how to install Coherent, followed by hundreds and hundreds of pages of nothing but man pages in alphabetical order. It was good night time or spare time reading. You could delve anywhere into the book and read away. And I did. Or you could look up some particular man page if you felt like it. Most value-for-money book I've ever read. https://archive.org/details/CoherentMan/page/n3/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/CoherentMan/page/n3/mode/2up

AdieuToLogic 3y ago
> Strangely enough, I did learn Unix by reading all the man pages. Ditto. > My first introduction to a Unix was via 'Coherent', a v7 clone back in the early 1990s. At or near the same time as your introduction was mine with Consensys SVR4 for i386[0]. IIRC, Consensys sold stat-mux cards for PC's at the time, hence their Unix SVR4 product. It was reasonably priced along with being a pretty vanilla AT&T distribution. Good times :-) 0 - https://github.com/Mellvik/Consensys-SVR4 https://github.com/Mellvik/Consensys-SVR4
- whartung 3y ago
  > Ditto Double ditto. When I started (Sun 1 era), it was all we had. No internet. No USENET. No BBSes. No real magazines. Dr Dobbs and Byte. Also, no one to talk to. The little group I was in was the “cutting edge”. So we had to make it all up. We were normally a VAX shop, rest of the company was running off the CDC mainframe. We were also just getting early PCs. “man -k” was your friend. We pretty much also never had any training. Biggest regret was I think they sent the wrong guy to learn the Lisp machines (TI Explorers). Very hard to pick up, and the engineer they sent simply didn’t have the CS background or inner geek drive to really exploit their potential. They basically taught him some high level, entry level expert system (likely CLIPS or OPS5 based) and that was it. So they pretty much sat idle while we hammered on the Suns. Too bad.
  - simonblack 3y ago
    No real magazines. Dr Dobbs and Byte. Those were the real magazines. <grin>
- simonblack 3y ago
  Consensys! Thank you. Yep. That was it. I went nuts the other day trying to remember the name of the first 'Real UNIX' I was using about 12-18 months after I started with Coherent. After Consensys, I used Novell's Unixware, Sun's SunOS (Solaris 1), then Solaris 2, and finally Linux.
smcameron 3y ago
> Strangely enough, I did learn Unix by reading all the man pages. I remember SunOS 4.x, going through the contents of /bin, /usr/bin, and /sbin (iirc), and reading the man page for each thing I found there. There was a man page for everything in there. About 20 years ago, I tried the same exercise on some Redhat variant, and there was tons of stuff with no man page. Nowadays, spot checking my linux Mint system, (and presumably Ubuntu and Debian) the situation seems much better, at least in that man pages seem to exist for all executables in those directories. Maybe Debian based systems have always been better about that than Redhat. In general, I feel that if you're creating an executable that you expect others might use, failing to create a man page for it is to commit a crime against humanity.
- JdeBP 3y ago
  On that subject: Three guesses what the preconv command in GNU troff does, before clicking on the hyperlink. (-: * https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/preconv.html#preconv https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/preconv....
technofiend 3y ago
I too learned most of what I knew about Unix at the time from man pages although I did have a support group in that I worked for a retailer who sold Unix machines to small businesses. We had Altos Xenix machines and AT & T's PC 7300 with Kaypro, Compaq, Columbia and of course "real" PCs from IBM all sitting on the sales floor. In fact weirdly IBM's short-lived attempt to keep their PC line from gutting midrange sales by selling a small midrange server introduced me to a truly bizarre Unixism. A bunch of us from the retail org were sent to IBM training on these new old systems. Unfortunately for the trainers alot of our feedback was "this is so much easier in Unix or Windows". Lol. But during the training, I actually had some dudes tell me it was "too dangerous" for the "general public" to have root and they were members of the California Root User's association and would be calling my boss shortly to take over management of our computers. Lol. In retrospect I hope they were trolling 18-year-old me. But I've bumped into the attitude since where people are terrified of running at a naked root prompt and insist every command must be buffered through sudo, as though that somehow insulates you from typos. And I once sat in a presentation where a cybersecurity consulting firm suggested were fire the hundreds of sysadmins we had to manage our environment and instead employ them to supply two 5-10 person admin teams. Those teams would spend the majority of their time red teaming each other but could do admin duties to fill in the gaps of their spare time. Anyway. The most bizarre thing about Unix is having learned its use in the 80s I'm still using a derivative to this day. That's not a shot at Unix. I just always assumed there would be some next big thing and we'd all move on.

AdieuToLogic 3y ago

> Strangely enough, I did learn Unix by reading all the man pages. Ditto. > My first introduction to a Unix was via 'Coherent', a v7 clone back in the early 1990s. At or near the same time as your introduction was mine with Consensys SVR4 for i386[0]. IIRC, Consensys sold stat-mux cards for PC's at the time, hence their Unix SVR4 product. It was reasonably priced along with being a pretty vanilla AT&T distribution. Good times :-) 0 - https://github.com/Mellvik/Consensys-SVR4 https://github.com/Mellvik/Consensys-SVR4

whartung 3y ago
> Ditto Double ditto. When I started (Sun 1 era), it was all we had. No internet. No USENET. No BBSes. No real magazines. Dr Dobbs and Byte. Also, no one to talk to. The little group I was in was the “cutting edge”. So we had to make it all up. We were normally a VAX shop, rest of the company was running off the CDC mainframe. We were also just getting early PCs. “man -k” was your friend. We pretty much also never had any training. Biggest regret was I think they sent the wrong guy to learn the Lisp machines (TI Explorers). Very hard to pick up, and the engineer they sent simply didn’t have the CS background or inner geek drive to really exploit their potential. They basically taught him some high level, entry level expert system (likely CLIPS or OPS5 based) and that was it. So they pretty much sat idle while we hammered on the Suns. Too bad.
- simonblack 3y ago
  No real magazines. Dr Dobbs and Byte. Those were the real magazines. <grin>
simonblack 3y ago
Consensys! Thank you. Yep. That was it. I went nuts the other day trying to remember the name of the first 'Real UNIX' I was using about 12-18 months after I started with Coherent. After Consensys, I used Novell's Unixware, Sun's SunOS (Solaris 1), then Solaris 2, and finally Linux.

smcameron 3y ago

> Strangely enough, I did learn Unix by reading all the man pages. I remember SunOS 4.x, going through the contents of /bin, /usr/bin, and /sbin (iirc), and reading the man page for each thing I found there. There was a man page for everything in there. About 20 years ago, I tried the same exercise on some Redhat variant, and there was tons of stuff with no man page. Nowadays, spot checking my linux Mint system, (and presumably Ubuntu and Debian) the situation seems much better, at least in that man pages seem to exist for all executables in those directories. Maybe Debian based systems have always been better about that than Redhat. In general, I feel that if you're creating an executable that you expect others might use, failing to create a man page for it is to commit a crime against humanity.

JdeBP 3y ago
On that subject: Three guesses what the preconv command in GNU troff does, before clicking on the hyperlink. (-: * https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/preconv.html#preconv https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/preconv....

technofiend 3y ago

I too learned most of what I knew about Unix at the time from man pages although I did have a support group in that I worked for a retailer who sold Unix machines to small businesses. We had Altos Xenix machines and AT & T's PC 7300 with Kaypro, Compaq, Columbia and of course "real" PCs from IBM all sitting on the sales floor. In fact weirdly IBM's short-lived attempt to keep their PC line from gutting midrange sales by selling a small midrange server introduced me to a truly bizarre Unixism. A bunch of us from the retail org were sent to IBM training on these new old systems. Unfortunately for the trainers alot of our feedback was "this is so much easier in Unix or Windows". Lol. But during the training, I actually had some dudes tell me it was "too dangerous" for the "general public" to have root and they were members of the California Root User's association and would be calling my boss shortly to take over management of our computers. Lol. In retrospect I hope they were trolling 18-year-old me. But I've bumped into the attitude since where people are terrified of running at a naked root prompt and insist every command must be buffered through sudo, as though that somehow insulates you from typos. And I once sat in a presentation where a cybersecurity consulting firm suggested were fire the hundreds of sysadmins we had to manage our environment and instead employ them to supply two 5-10 person admin teams. Those teams would spend the majority of their time red teaming each other but could do admin duties to fill in the gaps of their spare time. Anyway. The most bizarre thing about Unix is having learned its use in the 80s I'm still using a derivative to this day. That's not a shot at Unix. I just always assumed there would be some next big thing and we'd all move on.