The Wonderful Magic of Unix
An operating system that is rooted deeply in my heart, literally.
I remember those heady days of the 70s and 80s when computers gradually started to appear in my own everyday life.
First in high end and very unaffordable business and technology magazines (at least to my pocket money funded world), in darkened tiny almost-classrooms (essentially flickering green CRT lit broom cupboards) hidden away near the headmaster’s office at school (you could only book a half hour at a time, days in advance), then in Sunday newspaper supplements (where soldering was optional if you’d pay the extra £20), and finally the exponential explosion into High Street stores.
The operating systems were varied, inconsistent, and very definitely proprietary such that it was only when I started studying computer science at college that I was exposed to my first real behemoths of the time.
The Prime mainframe was my first experience, learning Pascal in a tortuously slow shared time sliced environment, but my eyes were opened by a remarkable IBM system that was hidden away not of the second floor glass walled forbidden Prime installation but in the basement underneath the common area where all the bright amber CRT character terminals were.
It was my first experience with UNIX, or Unix if you’re not concerned about trade…
