One of a small number of books (such as TCP/IP Illustrated[2]) that progressed me from the larval hacker stage.

I also met Lions when I was a kid, but didn't put 2 + 2 together until 20 years later!

[0] https://github.com/bringhurst/xv6 [1] https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2011/xv6.html [2] https://www.r-5.org/files/books/computers/internals/net/Rich...

About 50 years ago. This is actually kind of cool.

It's part of history. I also like the UNIX philosophy still, even though I would say Linux is not 1:1 using the same philosophy these days.

My all-time favourite showcasing of UNIX is Brian Kernighan showing how pipes work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0

Nowadays I feel pipes are, while still very useful, not quite as powerful, in part because computer systems themselves became more powerful and a lot of the software stack out there has "batteries included". For instance, many of the things that are done via pipes, I may do via ruby or python, even if it may not be as efficient (I also use pipes of course, but my point is more that today pipes aren't quite as useful as they once used to be, even if they still have a use case).