myhistory

The other papers

formatting source

From Paul's: > You could look up Neal Stephenson's excellent book: "In the Beginning was the Command Line".

The book didn't change my life, but affirmed a direction. The command line in this case is the shell. And a long-held principle of mine: "my threshold of pain is three". when i find myself doing the nearly indentical job for a third time, an alarm goes off: "isn't it time to generalize", or capture this in a useful way.

The command line leads directly to functions, and collections of functions soon replace scripts.

My milestones, some pre-linux:

• 1/15/1979 "discovered" unix in Palo Alto, CA, with Ford Aero.
• 2/24/1998 put all my one-line functions in a library called "henny", after henny youngman, the master of the one-liner.
• 7/16/2006 began formalizing the shell library practice.
• 10/23/2013 published Shell functions
• April 2104 discovered Markdown
• April 2015, discovered Org.Mode