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 machin

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.