I have no proof for what I am about to say, but I did grow up in the 1970s... tl;dr: man and info pages were never the way to learn Unix There was a strong cul

I have no proof for what I am about to say, but I did grow up in the 1970s... tl;dr: man and info pages were never the way to learn Unix There was a strong culture in nearly every professional competency 40+ years ago for social learning. It simply wasn't "done" back then for loners (and I am one) to sulk away with manuals for how to do... anything complicated and expect to gain mastery. One great example of this was trying to learn how to set non-electronic ignition points (for a gasoline engine). You _could_ try to figure it out with a manual and decipher the crude diagrams, but 25 minutes with someone who'd been taught by someone else transmitted much more knowledge than you could ever expect to get out of a handbook. Afterward, those crude diagrams would spring to life with fresh and helpful visual context. man pages weren't for beginners; they were for people who knew the basic forms and wanted to learn all of the other options. Yet, once you understood the basics of the top dozen Unix commands, then man pages could be used in isolation to learn most other commands. We didn't learn c back then by combing through the standard c library references, etc. Later on, Bjarne Stroustoup summed up how to improve (in general) in the first section of his seminal "The C++ Programming Language" when he wrote (paraphrasing from memory): 1) Know what you want to say. 2) Read others' works and copy from the best. The development of the initial Unix userland tools at Bell Labs (and the drafting of most of the initial RFCs) was a social process and the use of those tools was passed down socially for decades. Even in school, older students were a major source of understanding for how to use these tools. As this era began to fade away in the mid-1990s, it wasn't Stack Overflow that filled the void (yet) but rather "recipe" books such as Oreilly's "Unix Power Tools". These were often written in a conversational style, as if the social learning context was continuing, only in written form. It is somewhat ironic that AI tools like ChatGPT are now bringing the process full-circle, where we must once again seek the wisdom of a competent agent by engaging in conversation, carefully crafting our questions so as not to elicit an incorrect answer or go off on an irrelevant tangent.